For those of you who <a href="https://forums.audiworld.com/feedback/msgs/26227.phtml">missed it</a>, there is a <a href="http://search-test.audiworld.com/">Beta Search Engine</a> available.

Please give it a test and let me know if you find any problems or have any suggestions.

There are two things that I know will change before it goes live:

- The UI will change slightly. Selecting forums is a bit weird and takes up a lot of screen real estate.
- We will index all of the forums and all of the messages in the forums. Right now we just index a handful of forums (any requests in the short term?) and only those posts made this year. It's a little over 1 million posts in total right now.

 

Why is it that neither the old nor the new engine finds any cases of "immobilizer" in any forum in any part of the messages from 5/1/05 to the present, 5/11/05 when there are occurrences? I posted one on 5/10/05. Further, my Audiworld name is All-Audi-Home and no occurrences of that can be found at any time in any setting.

 

I typed in "immobilizer" and set the start date to 2005-05-01 and got <a href="http://search-test.audiworld.com/index.html?q=immobilizer&u=&s=all&db=2005-05-01&de=2005-05-11">23 hits</a>.

The old search engine had the indexer disabled a couple of months ago. It won't have any recent posts.

Also, why are you searching for your screen name for? Did someone write a post and put your screen name in the title or body?

 

Good Stuff! Is it indexed automatically, and how often?

 

Thanks! You are correct. I had used date format as in the old search engine 05/xx/2005. Revised date format improves the search results. But, note that it still did not find my immobilizer post from 5/10.

The reason I was searching for my screen name was that I could not find my post anywhere using either the old or beta search engine. I still cannot. Yet it exists at:
https://forums.audiworld.com/a8d3/msgs/18702.phtml

Apparently, one cannot search for All-Audi-Home as that is considered by
search engines as three different words with many, many hits. I tried
"All-Audi-Home" with quotes but that also does not find anything.
Tx

 

I want to get the kinks worked out first, then I was going to do a full reindex. It would then update the index every hour with new posts and edits.

 

Thanks, looking forward to using it daily. :-)

 

some people change their username often, but their AID# stays the same for the account. This is a great feature to be able to search just for your account results.

But I think the real punch line is that the A8 D3 forum is not yet indexed during this beta period. I see you only have 7 posts - are they all in that forum?

Also, the most recent results from any search is showing up as 5/10/05.

Put all that together and I think we see why you can't find your posts. You might want to try with someone else's username/AID for a date between 1/1/05 and 5/10/05, in a forum that is listed in the Database Filter.

Just my $0.02

 

The addition to search by AID, Links, and Images is Extremely Powerful! That has increased the functionality/usefulness of the search by an unexplainable amount. Thank you.

Suggestions:

1.) Open-ended search
I would like to search for ALL posts that I (AID=139) have made on the TT FORUM that include an IMAGE. Currently I can specify those search criteria, except for the first; I can not searh for "ALL". "*" does not work, a blank space does not work. I could try some common words, but that's just a shotgun approach and doesn't meet my search needs. Could you please implement some way that I don't need to specify a specific word, but rather allow the rest of the filters be the criteria for search.

2.) make Date Range easier to edit (Drop Down)
Quite often one of the first things I do when searching is to limit the date range. Either I only want to get recent replies to a question I want answered, or I know the approx time in the past where a post was made that I'm looking for. Either way, I am gong to limit the date range. Having it a one text box with "-" in it can make it cumbersome to edit quickly. I suggest that you make a Drop Down for the date. If you at least make it for the Year, that would be a great addition. It would allow a user to just click twice to quickly change the year, as oppose to carefully highlighting the 4 digits and then retyping them every time. I guess if you do the year, it would make sense to do the Month and Day for consistancy. What I'm thinking about is something like the date drop down here: http://travel.yahoo.com/ but also with the year.

3.) Search the text of a Link URL
Currently I see that the new search engine will return a text search that is part of a Link URL if that URL was put in the Message Body of the post. If the Link URL was put in the "Optional Link URL" field, the search does not return those.

4.) Search the text of an Image URL
The search does not currently return any results for Image URLs, regardless if they are in the Message Body or the Optional Image URL field. Please add so both of these are returned in a search. For instance, I might want to find all posts where I posted a specific image, and as such I'd like to search for the name of that file. Maybe I'm just trying to find those posts, maybe I've moved the photo and want to update all links, etc, etc.

5.) Allow quotes " " to specify an exact phrase
...to return, which might include blank spaces or special characters. For instance, if I want to find only "mike@awe", but not random posts with either "mike" and/or "awe" in them (which is what is currently returned). Ok, as I have been testing this it seems to work well for blank spaces (although it still highlights those words when they are not part of the exact phrase). I'd like to see it work for at least these characters as well, but the more the better:
- _ / @ = #


6.) Move the search selections when results are found.
After results turn up, they are currently off the screen at the bottom, requiring a scroll every time a search is performed. Either consider placing the results *above* the criteria, or move the criteria to the side as notjcs suggested below.

7.) Database Filter takes up too much real estate
You already know this, and it will only get worse with more forums. Multiple columns seems teh way to go. If you need more width, you can get rid of the left column that has the section headers, and just put them on top of each section, gaining you that left-side real estate back.


It's already worlds better than before. Thank you soooo much! I can't wait to start using it!

 

for some reason i cant get anything to come up under uid search