Search box result relevance



  • So, the search box is always super hit or miss for me (and yeah, yeah, I could just bookmark the threads I use often but infrequently instead of using the search box).

    It seems to be especially bad if you are searching for the title of the thread. For instance, I was trying to search for the "Quotes Out of Context" thread, so I entered "quotes out of context" into the search box, and got...

    1. https://what.thedailywtf.com/post/745 ("Why" + " is" + " " + "this" + " " + "ba" + "d?")
    2. https://what.thedailywtf.com/post/9301 (The most """"best"""" practices in ten lines)
    3. https://what.thedailywtf.com/post/3127 (Gmail's "context-sensitive" ads)
    4. https://what.thedailywtf.com/post/414 (Is HE testing "for" or "switch" ?)
    5. https://what.thedailywtf.com/post/5599 ("password" "protected")
    6. https://what.thedailywtf.com/post/940181 (The right result! Woo!)

    Selecting to search only the titles gave me identical results to the default "Titles & Posts". Now, there's a degree to which I can kind of understand how things are getting confused, since the bad results all have " running rampant from the various times this forum has been imported into new software. But I have similar problems with other threads and searching for sub-sets of their title (I tried "Political Troll" for The Inflamed Political Trollery thread last night, and the results there would have made McKayla Maroney feel good about her silver medal...)

    Not sure that I have a concrete suggestion about how to do it better, but I would like it if the search box had some combination of:

    • Higher prioritization of Exact Match words in the Thread Name (especially if only searching in Titles)
    • Higher prioritization of more recently created threads (most of the times I get a ton of bad results, they're FBNECROMAC threads)
    • Ability to read my mind and correct my search terms for what I really wanted :trollface:

    (Also, while posting this... TIL that using quotes around my search term, e.g. "quotes out of context", does improve search result by matching on the whole string instead of individual words from it, so I suppose that helps in cases where the search string has super common short words).



  • Boosting priority for more term matches is definitely on our to-enhance list for search. Other enhancements start to bring us past the point of diminishing returns, but we'll consider all options 😄


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    I have it sort by most recent reply. Relevance never worked for me, I think, because the relevance is trying to think like a person and I'm thinking like an exact match.


  • Java Dev

    @tsaukpaetra said in Search box result relevance:

    I have it sort by most recent reply. Relevance never worked for me, I think, because the relevance is trying to think like a person and I'm thinking like an exact match.

    I think what @julianlam means is merely, if you're searching for green apples, to put the results which match both green and apples above those which match only one of the two.


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