The current search functionality only searches individual posts, rather than all text within a topic. simonsarris wants to be able to search for topics involving a specific user and keywords, even if the keywords are not in a post authored by that user.
simonsarris explains that they expect to see results like “topics involvingjohnsmith and keywords”, which could include topics started by the user where the keyword is mentioned, or topics where the user posted and someone else mentioned the keyword.
DeanMarkTaylor agrees that this is a reasonable expectation and notes that implementing ordering by relevance would be important, with posts that include both the user and keywords having a higher weight.
codinghorror confirms that this is not currently possible, with search only able to scope to all posts by a specific user or all posts in a specific topic.
simonsarris provides an example of how this issue affects them, and sam suggests an advanced filter using keywords like op: and involved:, which simonsarris thinks is a good idea.
Suppose I have a topic where a user named blah asks a question, and later I reply “you should use someFooMethod”
Suppose I want to find this topic later, where this user has asked a question. I remember the user and I remember what I said, so I do a search for:
user:blah someFooMethod
I would expect to see the topic in the search results, but instead I see no results.
This seems to be because search is only searching individual posts, instead of searching all the text in each topic, so it does not find the topic where user blah asked a question and I gave someFooMethod as the result.
Is there a way to make search look at the entire topic text to match its query instead of just looking at individual posts? I think most forum searching software would find the topic I am looking for with my query.
So you are wanting a user:johnsmith search to search all posts in topics created by johnsmith even if he didn’t post them?
Yeah, or more generally, if I searched for:
user:johnsmith keywords
I would expect to see results that could be described as “topics involvingjohnsmith and keywords.” At least that’s sort of my intuitive expectation from using major search engines, and it seems to be important at least for technical Q&A search.
So maybe topics he started where the keyword is mentioned, but perhaps also just topics he posted in where he or someone else mentioned the keyword.
The implementation of ordering by relevance would one to consider carefully. I would expect where johnsmith posts which include the keywords to have a higher weight (appear higher in search results) than those that didn’t.
That’s the opposite of what I want. I want to search for a topic that contains both a user and a keyword, but the keyword is not in a post that the user authored. (it was in a reply to that user’s post, etc)
I really like that idea (and the keyword “involved” seems accurate).
The main place this issue comes up for me is in a support forum, where I know Person_A answered someone’s question and their reply contained some_term, but can’t (easily) find the topic to link to someone without such a filter.
