Searrrch

February 13, 2008 8:33 AM

New search is not my favorite

I was just searching for "Where do you see yourself in" to find help/advice in answering questions like that in interviews, and searching in the site for it turned up a lot of noise. I got frustrated and switched over to Google and put in my exact same search phrase. Ask Metafilter's "Where do you see yourself in 5 years?" came up as the #2 result.

I've found that it's really hard to find previously submitted questions on the site with the new search, and thats made me sad.

posted by ZackTM to bugs at 8:33 AM (27 comments total)

The MeFi search doesn't do bound phrases particularly well and I think it's decent at being a good complement to Google but not a full replacement for it. We should maybe make the FAQ clearer on this but optimizing for things MeFites might want that Google can't do [tag search, separating posts from comments, category searching in the near future] means that some things that Google does well, we can't easily replicate.
posted by jessamyn at 8:36 AM on February 13

Exact phrases don't work very well and that's why we offer links to Yahoo! and Google search results for your query on every results page. MeFi site search has been around for about a month, and we're still working on improving it. Grabbing search results for exact phrases is on our list of features to add. As jessamyn mentioned, MeFi search will never be a replacement for Google, but it's another tool you can use to find stuff.
posted by pb at 8:46 AM on February 13

Exact phrases don't work very well and that's why we offer links to Yahoo! and Google search results for your query on every results page.

With that knowledge in mind, what about just putting G/Y search boxes on the Search page? Single word or tag? Try the site search. Phrase or generality? Use Google or Yahoo.
posted by carsonb at 8:57 AM on February 13

aaaaaaaaaaand scene!
posted by shmegegge at 8:59 AM on February 13

aaaaaaaaaaand scene!

I didn't see any exeunt. Did you see any exeunt? I didn't think see. Quit rushing the scene, schmegegge. Let the moment play out. This is the problem with editing in cable television today-- too choppy, too many quick cuts, nobody wants to just let things breathe for a beat or two.
posted by dersins at 9:07 AM on February 13

I didn't think see.

clearly.


posted by dersins at 9:07 AM on February 13

carsonb, some phrases work ok, so I don't think it makes sense to send people to Google or Yahoo! first. But if your results here don't work out, hit the links.
posted by pb at 9:22 AM on February 13

The Search page that you get to by clicking the footer link doesn't have links to G/Y. Maybe we should add them?
posted by jessamyn at 9:25 AM on February 13

Not sure what you mean, jessamyn. Do you want links to Google and Yahoo, or a search box that takes you to results limited to metafilter.com at Google and Yahoo.

The links to G/Y I was talking about are on search results pages after you've searched for something here.
posted by pb at 9:43 AM on February 13

The links to G/Y I was talking about are on search results pages after you've searched for something here.

Oh sorry, I hadn't done a search to check. I just thought a search page that highlighted MeFi search but suggested maybe G/Y for bound phrases etc might direct people to the right tool. Right now if you do a typical Googley thing and type a phrase in quotes into the MeFi search box it drops the quotes out and just searches for the words. If people are really looking for those words in a phrase specifically, seems like they should start with Google limited to MeFi with whatever archive and user pages limited out, the way I think they used to be.

Just thinking out loud on this one but it makes more sense I think for people to start with the right tool, esp if the MeFi search is great at what it does do well, but really not recommended for certain types of searching. I'm specifically talking about bound phrases where you're looking for certain words in a certain order. I don't think MeFi search is really built do do that, which is fine but it might be good to have a box right there for those sorts of searches. If it's really on the feature list, then yeah I'd say we shoudl just wait until it's built, but if it's a long way off saying "hey search phrases using this box..." might be better.
posted by jessamyn at 9:54 AM on February 13

Thank you jessamyn, for articulating what my mucus-clogged brain-fingers connection couldn't.
posted by carsonb at 9:56 AM on February 13

And you can't find a particular person's posts by using the Mefi search feature like you can Yahoo or Google. It comes up empty if you put in a user name, unless the user is mentioned in the body of the comments. Sometimes, I remember that a particular user made a comment about something or I want to look at a user's recent comments and the easiest way for me to do it, was to just put their name in the search field (this is assuming that I don't have a comment by that person in front of me, in which case I can just click on their name, of course, and look at their recent activity list).
posted by otherwordlyglow at 10:03 AM on February 13

aaaaaaaaaaand scene!

Where/when did this phrase become commonplace among non-directors? I say it quite often and I can't remember where I heard it from first...
posted by CitrusFreak12 at 10:06 AM on February 13

otherwordlyglow, we have a user history search on the way. (Also not good at exact phrases.)

thanks jessamyn, I see. yeah, a separate form to search for exact phrases at Google and Yahoo is probably the way to go right now.
posted by pb at 10:14 AM on February 13

And you can't find a particular person's posts by using the Mefi search feature like you can Yahoo or Google.

We're working on the finishing touches of user-specific search. It's a-comin'.

And it is shit hot.
posted by cortex at 10:20 AM on February 13

If you're taking suggestions on improving the site search I'd like to request an operator to turn off partial matching. Searching for something like "car" returns all sorts of undesired hits for words like "scarf" and "scar"
posted by Mitheral at 10:25 AM on February 13

Didn't the original search do phrases okay? How about making it an option?
posted by timeistight at 10:55 AM on February 13

Mitheral, is it actually returning results based on general substring matches (like "car" -> "scarf"), or are you just seeing substring highlighting on "matches" in results that themselves all contain the literal search string? (Where, for example, a comment that contains both the words "car" and "career" turns up, correctly, in the search for "car", but the first three letters of "career" get highlighted in the excerpt.)

Because in general (the new tag search excepted), we aren't actually doing any general substring matching, aside from some limited suffix-matching that SQL Server supports as an option (+s, +ed, etc).
posted by cortex at 10:57 AM on February 13

timeistight, the original search used a different technology behind the scenes that brought the server to a grinding halt. In the battle between uptime and exact phrase matching, uptime wins.
posted by pb at 11:20 AM on February 13

Hard to argue with that. Thanks, pb.
posted by timeistight at 1:57 PM on February 13

I added a note to search results that mentions problems with finding exact phrase matches (if it looks like someone is searching for a phrase). The note offers handy links to G/Y search results for the same phrase.
posted by pb at 2:16 PM on February 13

cortex writes "are you just seeing substring highlighting on 'matches' in results that themselves all contain the literal search string?"

This is probably it. I saw the highlighting in results that weren't appropriate but honestly I wasn't paying that much attention because some of the results were what I was after. I'd just assumed some kind of regexing was being done.
posted by Mitheral at 2:19 PM on February 13

Main reason it occurred to me is that I had the exact same experience when we were first testing, Mitheral. So gimme a highfive and pass the PBR.
posted by cortex at 2:37 PM on February 13

Glad to hear that user search is coming. And that it's shit hot.
posted by otherwordlyglow at 3:53 PM on February 13

timeistight, the original search used a different technology behind the scenes that brought the server to a grinding halt.

Can't you just use the current search, and then filter the results in memory to get exact phrase search?
posted by smackfu at 3:55 PM on February 13

We discussed the idea briefly, smackfu, but our current plan takes less cleverness: offer the user a pre-constructed google search query URL as an alternate path for searches with quoted strings or many tokens.

If we can find some non-frootloop way to make onsite exact-phrase searching work, we totally will. I'm a big fan of the idea. But for now this'll probably work pretty well.
posted by cortex at 4:07 PM on February 13

I like suggesting clever ideas here, because I don't have to implement them like in real life. (Like paging would suck if you did in-memory filtering, but hey, not my problem.)
posted by smackfu at 4:09 PM on February 13