Single post in Once again, Forum Search
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Suggestion Title: Forum Search
Suggestion Summary: The search bar would search for text in the titles of undeleted, and in most forums, unlocked posts only.
Positive points:
Even a title-only search is better than nothing, because it can drastically reduce the number of unrelated posts.
EDIT 1: Removed references to searching content in most of the post. Because of summon tables and other personalizations like that, searching content would often be quite useless.
- Makes posts easier to find, especially in the trades forum
- Provides a strong PFQ-made search option
- Allows you to drastically cut down the number of thread titles you have to browse through.
- Some searches may not be accurate
- Many titles are very vague in terms of their content
- It's hard for a computer to understand the difference between looking for something and selling something (if we use trades as an example).
Specifics
- The search bar should appear on the third level of forums. Users should at least know where the thing they're looking for is, and the entire forum doesn't need to be searched when looking for a similar bug.
- Searching titles is a must, and if searching body content didn't have so many issues, it would be very useful too.
- The search bar should also only show unlocked and non-deleted posts (seems obvious, reason below). The bug and suggestions forums are places where locked posts should appear as well, because they are typically still relevant.
- Threads should be sorted by time. Since this is how threads are already sorted, it doesn't make any sense to do it any other way.
- Not initially, but common abbreviations should probably be expanded when searching.
- Selectors like age: or user: might seem useful at first, but they're not necessary. For age, you can stop at a certain depth when browsing manually, and I can't even think of why you'd search for a particular user.
- Quotes are absolutely imperative. Their use ought to be similar to in other search engines where it searches for exact phrases.
Rebuttle to Niet's example, with concessions
If I want to search for a beast ball, I might type "beast ball selling uft". This might find a post that says "selling beast balls", "buying beast balls", or "beast ball uft". If I don't get a thread directly referencing beast balls, I'll probably search "summons uft" or "summons selling". Instead of the one or two results I'd get for beast balls in a perfect world, I might get 30 (or far more in shops) threads selling summons. However, with the total number of threads reduced from 500 (the current number of trade threads) down to 30, my task of buying a beast ball is much less daunting.
In addition, icons or tooltips should not be an issue for a computer. Somewhere there's a dictionary or hash somewhere linking icons to words. Only PFQ stuff and no images of course.
My concession being that as Constantine said, the use of summon tables is very widespread. This makes any search trying to find a summon item almost immediately useless. If a search like this is so immediately obsolete, content searching likely shouldn't be included at first, if at all. It's a dream, but not one that works without entirely changing forums, which is far outside the scope of this suggestion and should hardly be suggested.
What it comes down to is that a search system doesn't need to understand what everything means. It should find things that match, sort them somehow, then leave it up to the user to find exactly what they want.
Why a native implementation beats current options
Our current two options when we want to search a forum are using an external search engine (Google, DuckDuckGo, etc.) with the "site:" selector and manually clicking through each page.
Both offer drawbacks and advantages over the other, but neither is truly the most useful.
Clicking through each page of the forum will inevitably get you the most accurate view of the titles of current posts, but takes a very long time if the thing you want isn't in the first few pages. You certainly get lots of threads that are completely unrelated, as well as vague, hopefully relevant threads with titles like "Specials UFT - cheap!". You have to click everything that seems relevant and manually scan through it to find what you want.
Using Google filters posts by content as well, but most of the top posts will be locked or deleted. When searching 'site:pokefarm.com/forum "beast ball"', the top posts are all deleted. This changes based on which you click and when Google crawls again, but part of the issue is that Google isn't handling current, accurate thread information, while a PFQ search bar would.
