* New search for the Forums

[Jane]

I have been experimenting with a third party search for the forums. It can be found at

https://www.fhug.org.uk/forumsearch

Please could you all have a play and see how it compares with the normal forum search. If it's positively received I may be able to add the Knowledge base pages to the index, I would need to write a script to do that.

Currently only posts from Public forums are indexed.

Please note at the moment the index is updated manually so will only include what is posted up until the last time I ran the update.

[Jane]

..

[Jane]

"Ignore me I am testing" & "some"

[ronk]

Extremely quick and useful search app. Would be very helpful to me. With the Knowledge Base included, very powerful, yet simple way to find an answer or explanation of a particular subject.
Ron

[Coolgarra]

Yes, I like the speed of this search, also the 'snippet' in the results so you can evaluate if you want to go to it.

[E Wilcock]

Jane - I have been a constant failure at searches for fh help.
I have not yet tried your app exhaustively but a big thank you for taking this step.

I tried it with the one word Census -and it brought up a string of forum Threads.

I then checked the normal search and, as I thought, got the rejection that census was too common a word to be searched on.
Mike always knows the phrase that is needed to make an effective search. But I dont and I suspect other new users dont either.

[Russell]

Thanks Jane

I too like the proposed search and think that it would be a very useful addition to this site.

Is it possible to allow Boolean searches? I've tried combinations of AND/OR and +/- but without success.

As the search displays results dynamically as you type, and is not case sensitive, this helps those who are not always accurate typists!

[Jane]

It's an "intelligent" search so if you put multiple words it automatically looks where they occur together, but it's not designed to handle and or searches, as you keep typing it will keep narrowing the search for you.

[tatewise]

Having alternative search options is likely to be useful.
I have not performed any extensive searching, but some differences can make a big impact.

1) Current FHUG Forum Search
This narrows the results list down to single postings, with the search words highlighted, so those words are easy to locate.

2) New FHUG Search
This just lists whole threads that somewhere contain the search words, but locating them can be a challenge.

As an example try searching for Lookup Missing BMD Records.
Firstly, 1) lists the Hints (14978) posting and others, but 2) does not list them despite the words matching several times.
Conversely, 2) lists Plug In for UK Birth/Baptism Records Missing (14671) and others that 1) does not!
Secondly, focus on the Civil Partnership thread in both cases.
For 1) you must scroll to page 2 to find it, but the words are easily located in context.
For 2) it is listed quite early, but locating the search words in such a long thread is tricky, unless you use say a browser Edit search tool.

[Jane]

I am limited to 10,000 entries, with a maximum of 10Kb per entry (so the threads are indexed for the first 8k of text) entries without having to have a commercial licence, which starts at £35 per month, I don't get anywhere enough donations to pay for that, which is why I settled on writing the index at the thread level.

The Knowledge base pages will be indexed at the Heading 2 level so they should not be such a problem.

[tatewise]

Jane, maybe that explains the effect I am seeing regarding such as Hints (14978).
Hints (14978) has a date of May 01, 2017 with 27 posts and Lookup Missing BMD Records occurs in 19th & 23rd, which on a quick assessment are beyond the 10k point.
Civil Partnership (14953) has date Apr 20, 2017 with 40 posts and Lookup Missing BMD Records occurs in 7th, 10th & 11th entries, so much earlier.

[Jane]

I have now added the knowledge base to the index and am at 8,700 records, I might do some experiments with the Forum to see how many threads are getting truncated and look to see if it's possible to split just the longer ones into chunks, those with more than say 5 replies without pushing the limit.

[jimlad68]

Any extra way of searching can often hone in on results in different ways of "seeing the wood for the trees"

I refer back to Searching the FHUG site (12768)

Is the google search site any better than this new FHUG one. I have noticed some sites incorporate google search for their own site search, is that possible/ free for FHUG?

[DavidNewton]

To use Google search on FHUG you need to add site:www.fhug.org.uk to the beginning of the search. I use Chrome with the extension toolbar button "search the current site" which does that prefix for you (and of course works in the same way for any other site you wish to search)

For example the search for "Lookup Missing BMD Records" on fhug produces 73 results listed in order of relevance to the phrase. A search for "census" reveals about 1550 results, not so useful.

David

[tatewise]

David, yes, that is the crux of jimlad68's reference and is described in info:forums#site_searches|> Site Searches.

What he is asking for is to embed that Google Search mode within the FHUG pages so you don't need to use a browser extension or another browser tab.

[Jane]

Algolia have allowed "open source" status so I can develop my plugin for phpbb.

I have now updated the index so it indexes every knowledge base page and every post in every topic. So you can search everything together.

To try it out please see

https://www.fhug.org.uk/forumsearch/

There are a couple of filters once you start searching one for the year of the post and one for the source, either Forum or Knowledge base at the moment.

[BillH]

Jane,

While I like the speed of the new search, there is something that isn't as nice.

On the old search if I scroll down the list of results and click on an item to go to the forum post and then click the back button it takes me back to the same point in the list of results.

In the new search if I do the same thing not only does it not take me back to the same position in the list, it completely looses the search results and I have to re-enter the search request and start paging through the results again to figure out where I was.

Is there any way the new search can be changed to retain the results list when clicking the back button and also remembering the position in the list?

[PeterR]

Meanwhile, you can right-click and then Open link in new tab.

[tatewise]

Probably irrelevant, but on an antique XP machine, aftern entering search text, pressing Return/Enter does nothing.

[BillH]

Peter,

Thanks for the reminder. That is a good workaround, but I wouldn't want that to be the way it works permanently. If so I'd rather have the current search.

[Jane]

Bill, I have changed the search so it opens a new window when you click on a link (it reuses the same window so you should not end up with lots of open FHUG windows.) I'll ask the question on the Algolia forums to see if is possible to store the instant search.

Mike the whole thing is done with javascript modules at the moment, hence the likely reason it's not working on XP. It should be possible to implement a "backend" search where java is not available if it's really needed, it will just take a chunk of reading on my part to work out how.

[tatewise]

Don't worry about XP. I only mentioned it in case there was a quick fix.

It does give a different perspective.
A big advantage is that it lists the nearest sub-heading in the Knowledge Base.
So for example when searching for Problem Reporting the best entry is much more obvious.

Like all Search filters, it only works well if you choose the 'correct' words to search for.

Whereas, the alphabetic_index|> Knowledge Base Index we are trialling can use topic words that are not necessarily in the Knowledge Base page.

[Jane]

I think the Index will be a great help for the Knowledge base. Once there are more in I could add them as index entries in the search as well. I wrote the code which adds the entries, so I should be able to extract the topic entries.

This search I would like to see this as good start point on the "Front" page and when searching from the top of the forum, leaving the Advanced search and the topic search to use the original forum search.

I was thinking of adding the Forum name as a filter (I would need to redo all the indexing to do this) for the Forum, so it could be filtered as you can the Year.

[tatewise]

Yes, that all sounds good.

Is there a better way of differentiating KB from Forum results?
Posted By KB-Editor identifies KB entries, but otherwise it is not very obvious.
Also the current layout displays the Posted: ... message almost on same line as next heading, which lead me at first to think it applied to that heading rather than the heading above.
On the same line as heading it relates to would be good, rather like the Forum itself does.

[Jane]

I have moved the posted by up it will go next to the head pushed right if there is room.

I have put an icon in front of the KB results, obviously you can also filter the results to match just the KB if you want.