I was searching for the “Consolidating Activity Field” thread. I couldn’t remember the title, but I remembered the discussion about “heatmap” and “coldmap” - and I couldn’t find the thread searching for those terms. It didn’t appear anywhere in the results. My search terms were not in the title - and that’s very often the case; more often than not, I would imagine. (Only one topic in the results for “heatmap” does have the word in the title.) If I’d remembered that I’d posted in it, I might have found it via my profile, but it was a very brief post and I didn’t remember it.
This is a very recent thread which I had been following, and yet I couldn’t locate it. What chance would I have a month from now, with an even hazier recollection of the details? As a moderator, I very often want to refer members to relevant threads, and I need a reliable way to find them. I have grave concerns that Discourse search is not nearly reliable enough.
The fact that @DaveMaxwell kindly undertook to find the topic for me after I’d given up, and ran into the same difficulties, suggests that there is, indeed, a problem with Search and not just with the searchers.
I should be most grateful if improvements to search could be prioritised, as I otherwise anticipate major problems in a forum the size of ours.