Dear Fellow Primates,
We finally upgraded our Search module on WSO to an Apache Solr system for a MUCH better search experience. We had to get a new server for this but I think it will be worth the $s since it is a huge improvement. Not only is it lightening fast but with Faceted Apache Solr Search you can now:
- Filter By Date
- Filter By Content Type (Forum Topic, Blog Posts, Newsletters, Polls, Videos etc.)
- Filter By Author
- Immediately be given a count of how many times your terms show up across all of these filters
....and we can weight the results any way we feel is best. Prior to this change, I think there was a very significant recency bias on Google Custom Search, so old threads that were highly relevant were buried in the archives.
I've removed this recency bias and also given a slight bump to content with a lot of comments, and content that hit the home page...but we can change this as we go to try and tweak / improve it.
Hopefully over the next month we'll reach a nice balance and find ourselves with a much better Search solution for WSO. Now you don't have to feel guilty about telling new chimps to go use search because it is actually very powerful and fast.
Thanks again for all of your patience with this much needed change,
Patrick
ps - Please try it out and feel free to give me feedback here. Hopefully some old classic threads get discovered again.
That is such a leap, great stuff.......thanks so much for doing this
By the late morning, the search styling (for individual results/listings) will look even better; congrats on getting this project off the ground!
wow that's great
Good work patrick. If you give me some credits I will give you a silver banana.
I already told you I loved it, but I'll say it again since it really is a great improvement.
I also love the "monkey see, monkey do" tab. These are some great improvements
Dude, this new stuff is great. The "New" button on multi-page threads works wonders and the little industry buttons really help.
well thanks to you guys giving me some great tips. I'm about to go through the Suggestions thread again and see what else we can do to make the experience better on here for you guys.
Thanks
Looks like the search styling is up to snuff now: http://www.wallstreetoasis.com/search/apachesolr_search/monkey
Wow, the number of relevant threads that come up after doing a search is kinda overwhelming! I like!
This search is a HUGE improvement. Very nice. One thing I might tweak - for certain searches, job postings dominate the results, you may want to decrease their weighting. Checkout a search for "Corporate Development" for example...
Very nice, thanks for making this happen. I do enjoy finding a classic thread.
I finally found the bug with username searches - in the past, if your search included a username (ANYone's username), it would error out. Now, you can search whatever you'd like, and chances are, you'll find what you need, quite quickly!
More search improvements to come...
Another suggestion- could the track function show the user's exact post (or more practically the first 80 characters) instead of the title of the thread?
Unfortunately, that's a limitation of Drupal, the CMS this site uses to function - though that would be a nice thing to have fixed someday.
...and for a finale, there's another improvement we implemented today, which allows you to narrow down search results in a particular forum quickly and easily.
See the sample search: http://www.wallstreetoasis.com/search/apachesolr_search/monkey
After you visit that page, go down to "Filter by Forums" on the right. Powerful stuff!
Hey Patrick, one little thing. Would it be possible to add a filter on the new search that sorted the threads by most to least comments? Thanks
I will see if we can add this....
How about a filter by user? For example, I knew I had written a lengthy comment last year and was searching to find it, but couldn't filter out specifically my own posts. I ended up getting around it by sorting by username, then paging through until I found the C's, then finding my name.
A user filter might be good for monkeys that are looking for "eddie's post on rum" for example - hard to search for just "rum" and find what you want...
yeah, you can filter by "author", but that puts it in alphabetical order...do you mean a free form field where you can type in a users name and the results are filtered that way? that would be cool...will look into this as well.
I also just searched "rum" and eddies post came up first. am I missing something?
I did mean some way that you could type a users name and see only their posts. We kind of have it on the track page, but it gets cumbersome unless you're looking for a very recent post.
Captk, thanks for the feedback - I do think that would be cool but not sure if it's something that will take 1-2hrs of dev time or 10.
I'll ask my developer in charge of Search.
-Patrick
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