Continuing the discussion from Frustrated with Search in Discourse:
Hmmm, something’s still not quite right even after @sam’s update…
If you search for “search” the Frustrated with Search in Discourse topic still doesn’t show up, even if you click “show more”.
EDIT: Double-Stuf improved search feedback doesn’t appear either. However, this topic does show up.
Confirmed. Not just your computer.
Isn’t that simply because there are more topics with the word “search” in the title than can be listed, even with “show more”?
Maybe what we should add is “show even more” so you can keep clicking to keep getting results.
Thanks Jeff, that makes sense, if that is indeed the case. It wasn’t clear that the results were being truncated (if that is the case) after pressing show more. I just thought that was the actual number of results.
I imagine “search” must be a pretty noisy term. I am surprised that this topic appears in those results, I suppose “search” is the first word in the topic name, so it’s given a higher weighting?
Maybe show even more should go the full page result instead?
This is also yet ANOTHER implied argument for weighting newer topics in search results over older ones… that is what people tend to expect.
You could also weight by likes to posts ratio as well.
When I use the search I only ever tend to look for something that I saw a while ago. The use case is when somebody asks a question that I know I’ve seen the answer to some time ago.
That’s just my typical usage though.
May also want to consider incoming links to the topic.
Still, the topic you were looking for was started Feb 25 '14. That’s much more recent than, say, August 2013.
I find that people generally want more recent topics first in search results, though it could be a mild effect of simply shuffling year+ old topics to the back of the results.