cannot fix Search bar doesn't seem to work for some search terms

[rose.thashton]

Title. Seems like every forum I ever go to has a nonfunctional search bar. 

 

EDIT: For a lot of certain keywords, it seems. Some work just fine...

[Oshino Shinobu]

Normally best to use site:linustechtips.com in Google. 

[colonel_mortis]

What exactly are you searching that isn't giving you the results that you expect? Search is incredibly difficult to do well, so if there is anything specific that isn't working, we can see whether there's any way to fine tune the algorithm to give better results.

 

When you say that it doesn't work, do you mean that nothing is returned at all, or that the results are irrelevant?

[rose.thashton]

12 minutes ago, colonel_mortis said:

What exactly are you searching that isn't giving you the results that you expect? Search is incredibly difficult to do well, so if there is anything specific that isn't working, we can see whether there's any way to fine tune the algorithm to give better results.

I dunno. There are a lot of things that end up with issues. Any processor codenames, for example. They give me zero results which is clearly inaccurate. 

 

So yeah, the first one. 

[colonel_mortis]

8 hours ago, rose.thashton said:

I dunno. There are a lot of things that end up with issues. Any processor codenames, for example. They give me zero results which is clearly inaccurate. 

 

So yeah, the first one. 

Skylake gave several thousand results for me. What term exactly isn't working for you? 

[rose.thashton]

1 hour ago, colonel_mortis said:

Skylake gave several thousand results for me. What term exactly isn't working for you? 

I meant things like i3 or FX

[LogicalDrm]

2 hours ago, rose.thashton said:

I meant things like i3 or FX

I think those are too short terms. Like when google disregards you using "the" or "yes" as search terms since they are too common. Those aren't codenames, btw, but beginnings of model name/number. One could say family names.

[Unhelpful]

15 hours ago, colonel_mortis said:

What exactly are you searching that isn't giving you the results that you expect? Search is incredibly difficult to do well, so if there is anything specific that isn't working, we can see whether there's any way to fine tune the algorithm to give better results.

 

When you say that it doesn't work, do you mean that nothing is returned at all, or that the results are irrelevant?

Why not just have it go back to searching google with "site:linustechtips.com" followed by the search... Like it was before? That worked.

[colonel_mortis]

7 hours ago, rose.thashton said:

I meant things like i3 or FX

Search terms have to be at least 3 characters - it is not physically possible to search for anything less than that without completely redesigning the entire software, and probably making it considerably slower.

2 hours ago, JoeyDM said:

Why not just have it go back to searching google with "site:linustechtips.com" followed by the search... Like it was before? That worked.

Because that isn't really a solution - the built in search function adds of functionality that Google can't provide, such as searching by author or filtering by subforum. However, I am planning to look into adding an option to the search dropdown to allow you to use Google.

[rose.thashton]

1 minute ago, colonel_mortis said:

Search terms have to be at least 3 characters - it is not physically possible to search for anything less than that without completely redesigning the entire software, and probably making it considerably slower.

Because that isn't really a solution - the built in search function adds of functionality that Google can't provide, such as searching by author or filtering by subforum. However, I am planning to look into adding an option to the search dropdown to allow you to use Google.

Full CPU names don't work either, like i3-6100

[colonel_mortis]

8 minutes ago, rose.thashton said:

Full CPU names don't work either, like i3-6100

I suspect that's because of the "-", and it works without it. I'm not entirely sure why that's the case, but I have one idea, which, if I'm right, would mean that there's nothing we can do about it.