We have moved to a new Sailfish OS Forum. Please start new discussions there.
15

[tjc] the frequent duplicates situation

asked 2014-08-23 16:07:20 +0200

dsilveira gravatar image

updated 2014-12-02 03:28:07 +0200

Hi guys,

Alot of questions on tjc, are in fact duplicates, I myself even being careful searching first, sometimes have to close one question or another for being duplicate.

I think the biggest culprit is the fact that the search box is not very smart!

The reason I say this is because I always look for my question's keywords before I ask a new question, but the search box rarely connects the dots.

The main problems are:

  • The search box won't find partial word matches
  • It won't find related keywords either

I feel this is a bit troublesome, and we could do alot better. Having a better search algorithm could greatly increase the quality and focus of tjc! Are there no plans to improve this situation?


EDIT: Tried Tag searching, as suggested by @simo, and got partial keyword matching, but still no related keywords, and worst of all, it's out of focus, since most people will use the ask box, and won't even notice the tag search box.

At least half of the functionality is a low hanging fruit, so when are we going to improve the ask box?

EDIT 2: Just found a hilarious case, after seeing on the related column of some post, another one about mplayer/mpv playing which interested me, I closed that tab. But afterwards I went to look for that post with the search box and neither mplayer, nor mpv, had any matches, not even mplayer/mpv, the only way to find a match was to write mplayer/mpv-based!

Isn't this incredibly unhelpful? Is Jolla not going to move a muscle about fixing this incredibly inneficient tool, plaguing tjc?

edit retag flag offensive close delete

Comments

1

The dropdown lists only those results that have the words you typed in their titles. As Tanghus said, when you press Enter, you get to see all results, including those where the words you typed are only found in the body of the posts.

nthn ( 2014-08-23 19:42:15 +0200 )edit

had the same issue with some network related thing. i was searching fir it and asked later and it was duplicate of some question related to nails. it was not possoble to find this

NuklearFart ( 2014-11-05 09:38:55 +0200 )edit
1

@dsilveira: Feel free to report a feature request in the upstream askbot project in order to get a smarter seach. I personally do not face the issues you have with the search. The suggested results in the dropdown are suggestions and unless you press enter or click on the magnifier glass icon, you will not get the total amount of results matching your query. When it comes to searching for tags, or users, the functionality is only accessible if you click on the related links on the top right of the page. There are no keywords in askbot but tags, and searching for these do actually return correct matches AFAICS...

eric ( 2014-11-13 16:32:06 +0200 )edit

Regarding edit 2, searching for "mplayer" (pressing enter to show the results) finds that question.

ssahla ( 2014-12-02 07:53:18 +0200 )edit

Indeed, the dropdown only works for full words separated by space. But typing "mplayer" and hitting enter gives you... 3 results. Pretty easy to sort out no? No need to up the topic every two weeks, I know it's not perfect, but when you want find something, you can. Just try both ways...

Sthocs ( 2014-12-02 13:00:39 +0200 )edit

2 Answers

Sort by » oldest newest most voted
4

answered 2014-08-23 17:28:51 +0200

Tanghus gravatar image

If you submit the search form - i.e. press Enter - you will get more results than what's displayed in the dropdown.

edit flag offensive delete publish link more

Comments

1

That might be true, if only slightly, but still, that's not an answer to my question. Which I remind is about the smartness of the pattern-matching, and not about the number of results!

dsilveira ( 2014-09-02 05:56:21 +0200 )edit

The thing is, if that was enough, would there still be soooo many duplicates??

dsilveira ( 2014-09-02 05:58:22 +0200 )edit
2

Yes I think there would still be almost as many duplicates, because unfortunately people don't really care and think this place is write-only.

I've made an experimentation with some of your questions marked as "[duplicate]". I've typed the 2 main keywords for each:

  • "maps screen" > first result in the dropdown
  • "camera rotated" > third result in the dropdown is already marked as a duplicate and leads you to the original question
  • "calendar today" > 5th result after hitting enter

For the "app cover" bug, it appears also, but I agree it's difficult to spot. Anyway, you must always start with the idea than somebody probably already faced the same issue, especially for common issues/features request.

Sthocs ( 2014-10-08 15:31:42 +0200 )edit
1

@Sthocs the problem is, like I explained in the EDIT, that, if you don't get the keywords exactly right, but either type a partial or a related keyword, it doesn't find anything at all!

I don't know about you, but to me this seems not helpfull at all!

dsilveira ( 2014-10-08 16:21:40 +0200 )edit
1

answered 2014-11-06 01:24:30 +0200

simo gravatar image

I've been using tag search on the right panel first, and if there are too many results, then limit those further by one word search. This has been working quite well, so recommending

edit flag offensive delete publish link more

Comments

will try it, check back later, thanks for the suggestion

dsilveira ( 2014-11-06 04:24:11 +0200 )edit
Login/Signup to Answer

Question tools

Follow
2 followers

Stats

Asked: 2014-08-23 16:07:20 +0200

Seen: 673 times

Last updated: Dec 02 '14