Testing 2: Search

Submitted by Admin on Wed, 06/08/2022 - 19:10

The search feature (the search box at top-right of every page) is working and all pages can be searched for.

The new site's search works differently from the old site.

First it takes a more general approach to matching. So a search for bill on the old site was very literal - it would match bill, but not bills. On the new site a search for bill is broader, so it will match occurrences of bill, but also bills, bill's, billed, and more. The new site doesn't have an option for exact search, so if you type "bill" into the search box, you'll still get the matches for bills, bill's, etc.

Second, it includes results from a wider range of information on the site. The old search included matching pages for content (People, Places, etc.) and images in its results. The new search also includes matching Tags and Users in the results.

Third, when the search result is an image, we now show a thumbnail of the image in the list of results.

So there is an occasional trade-off when we'd like to search for an exact match, but overall I think the new search does a better job of showing us relevant results.

Please leave a comment below if you run into any problems with the search, especially if any searches don't show the results that you'd expect.

I tried a search for 'slaughter house'. I got six pages with with someting like 50 entries. Of course, there are matches for  'slaughter house', but also for 'slaughter' and 'house', less than one third is an exact match.

On the old website, the use of brackets  "slaughter house"  limited the number of results to exact matches only, it doesn't work on the new website.

The use of 'slaughterhouse' of course gives only exact matches. But you loose all the  'slaughter house' entries.

 

Yes, that is a downside of the search on the new site, it doesn't have the option to let us to search for exact matches.

 

Patricia gave another example of a multi-word search that returns too many irrelevant results: 

I find that Google's results are a lot more relevant, so as a workaround you'll now see this text added at the top of the search results:

  • If you're searching for multiple words, you may get better results from Google's search.

Clicking the link takes you to Google's results for the same search query.

I'd still like to see Gwulo's search handle multiple words better, but I think this will help in the meantime.

A couple of points to note:

  • I've set the link to ask Google to search for "site:gwulo.com hospital road", so it only shows results from the Gwulo website.
  • Google doesn't index new pages on Gwulo immediately, so its results may not be complete.

Sometimes I'm searching for entries (mostly photos) using a tag. The old website had the feature "tags" on the Atoms Library. What I did is, for example, use "aerial photographs" and press "apply".  In this case, 35 pages of aerial photographs appear. What I did next is to open the first image, click on the tag "aerial photographs" again, then I have all images with this tag one after the other (after clicking on photos), starting from old to new. 

Didn't find something similar on the new website. 

If you look at the directory block on the left of the page, I've added a link 'Tags' that takes you to a new page where you can search for a tag.

Please could you try it and let me know if it does what you need?

Thank you David, it works as I expected. The link "tags" only appears when logged in - is that intended?

And one more idea: when one creates an entry and adds tags, a list of existing ones pops up from which one can be selected. It would be helpful for this feature, too.

Thank you David, it works as I expected. The link "tags" only appears when logged in - is that intended?

Yes. It will be useful to present tags to casual visitors too, but I think we'll need an introduction page, not just a search.

And one more idea: when one creates an entry and adds tags, a list of existing ones pops up from which one can be selected. It would be helpful for this feature, too.

I started off with that approach, but then we only see one tag on the page. This way we can also use the page to help clean up tags - eg https://gwulo.com/tags?name=rail

David, yes, you are right. You'll find more possibilities when searching. My original intention was to have a support to avoid a typing error. So it is the best solution. Regards, Klaus