Broken Search Function?

[Michael Reid]

I've been frustrated before by the forum's search feature, thinking that it wasn't yielding the results I expected. My latest search efforts produced what seems to me to be pretty clear evidence that the search function doesn't work properly.

 

I was recalling discussions a few months ago about the meaning of "concert pitch." Wanting to find those discussions, here's what I did:

 

- Clicked on the Search icon (magnifying glass) in the upper right.

 

- Entered "concert pitch" in the search box. I included the quotation marks because i wanted posts only with that exact phrase. Clicking on the link to Advanced Usage Help shows the use of double quotation marks for this purpose.

 

- Highlighted "All Forums" in the list.

 

- Left the button for ordering results by "most relevant" checked.

 

This yielded only one result! I knew that couldn't be right. So for my next attempt, I left off the quotation marks from "concert pitch." Well, that yielded 600+ posts! But the screen showed that every instance of the word "concertina" was highlighted in the list of results, even though I did not enter "concert*" in the search box. (The asterisk is the operator for extending results to words that begin with the specified string.) And, oddly enough, when the results were sorted by relevance, the word "pitch" did not appear in the top-ranked post.

 

Well, guess what: I did find the discussions I was looking for -- by using Google and constraining the search to Concertina.net. I entered the following search:

 

site:www.concertina.net concert pitch

 

and the first hit was to a thead by David Barnert with "concert pitch" in the title.

[Ken_Coles]

Well, until Invision updates the hosting software, I guess the moral is to use Google! An interesting test, Michael.

[JimLucas]

I, too, have experienced that the Invision search funciton is next to worthless, and I'm offended that there's been no evidence that they've even attempted to fix it in all the time since the new Forums came to Concertina.net.

 

...until Invision updates the hosting software, I guess the moral is to use Google!

It seems odd to me that the Invision product, which I understand is widely used, could get away with having a search function that seems to fail in anything but a single-word search, and I believe I've seen instances where even that missed references that I could see. Try any of the variations from the instructions for "advanced" searches, and if you get a result at all -- an error message is just as likely -- it will certainly be incorrect (either too many "hits" or too few).

 

Ken, I'm sure you and Paul must have passed on our complaints about this to Invision, and I'm sure they must also have been told about it by other customers. I find it difficult to believe that they can't get it right, especially since such search utilities are ubiquitous, and there must be subroutines or dll's in the public domain which they could use. Do they simply not care?

 

(The 4-character minimum for search words is a separate issue, but having it hard-wired is inappropriate. Makes it impossible to search for things like "abc", "pad", "B/C", or ..... "Jim".)