Search doesn't behave as I would expect

AI-generated summary

MarcP is experiencing issues with the search function, where results are not prioritizing topic titles over URL matches in replies. Despite setting the target category to “high” search priority, the desired result is not appearing at the top. However, sam shares a recent search for “discord” that shows improved results, and MarcP confirms this improvement has also been observed on his end.

I used to always find what I needed with one query. But recently I kinda have to think, “what do I search to find what I need” for the second or third search query.

Like the example below, I search for Discord and expect the 3th result where Discord is in the topic title to be the top result, instead it’s showing me results where parts of Discord URL’s are matched in deep replies (there I mean: mostly not even the first post).

Does anyone else understand how this works? Like it should prioritize a title above a part of an URL that gets matched? The screenshot below just confuses me and the key question is what makes it rank the (totally irrelevant) topics.

The example here is one that’s very clear, because my target result is hit 3. But I have had situations where my target result was just not even in the top 5.

Now to make it even more interesting - the category of my target result (#3) has search priority “high” and all other categories have normal, apparently I already tried to fix this issue that way, but it doesn’t seem like the search priority made any change.

I don’t remember having issues like this in the past - it was always search, find and go. Now it’s search, think, search, find and go.

fwiw, we are doing quite well on a search for “discord” here these days:

This is a mix of better ranking based on title matches and category prioritization

I can confirm this has been improved on my end as well, nice!