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Testing new search facility

Tom Coates

15:47 / 23.01.06

We've been building something at work and I'm trying it out on Barbelith to see if it would work - it's a bit of javascript that you can install on a site to search it live through Yahoo (where I now work). Could people have a play and see what you think: potential search page

netbanshee

16:00 / 23.01.06

Pretty spiffy there Tom.

Works well in Safari and in Firefox on a Mac as well as Firefox and IE 6 on the PC. It doesn't seem to work in IE 5.2.3 on the Mac, but that's easily going the way of the dodo anyway. Nonetheless, the function still degrades nicely so you can still go to a results page with the typed in search term.

Smoothly

16:07 / 23.01.06

Looks spiffy, and it was working great, but if I click on one of the results, but then hit 'back' to try another, (a) I have to hit search again rather than going straight back to the results list, but more importantly (b) if I do this a couple of times it crashes IE.

E. Randy Dupre

17:06 / 23.01.06

Some results take you to the 'reply' page for the thread, not the thread itself. Any way of blocking those out? It's also repeating some results.

Search for 'elephant' and you'll get examples of both problems - the 'reply' screen is the fifth result down.

sleazenation

19:47 / 23.01.06

The search gives me that same problem as E. Randy - it lists results for empty 'reply' pages rather than threads themselves...

Shrug: Butcher Boy
(prev. Green My Eyes)

20:25 / 23.01.06

Not very a very analytical response but anyway: Yay!

grant

22:37 / 23.01.06

It's better than what we've got, and it looks nice. That erasing the page when you hit the back button thing is a mild annoyance, and there's something weird about the wiki results -- not weird, but difficult. I stuck "gnosticism" in there and got a couple blank wiki pages (based on their titles, I guess -- I turned one into a Redirect to a page with actual text on it). I also got a page from the Bomb and its equivalent number in the current wiki (cuz we brought all the Bomb over to the wiki).

It doesn't seem to search message text the way Google site:www.barbelith.com does... or does it? "Copperhead" returns that thread about Anna seeing the snake, which I believe doesn't mention copperheads in the abstract or title, just in a few messages. But there's only a handful of returns on "gnosticism," and it seems like there should be at least a dozen Temple threads that use that word. Maybe not.

neukoln

22:37 / 23.01.06

From a [groan] usability perspective it is a bit quick off the draw. In Mozilla it starts searching for the keyword before you click the 'Search' button. Which is a bit of a pain if you are searching for a string of words, or you pause to think about spelling of keyword.

You might expect hitting the 'enter' key on your keyboard, or clicking on the 'search' button to initiate the search. But you'd not expect pausing at the end of (or within) a word to send it spinning off on a search.

You can however retrieve the search by continuing to type your string/keyword. Which is odd, but nice.

netbanshee

23:04 / 23.01.06

I guess that on a usability level, this kind of search is making its way into the mainstream... the Spotlight search in Mac OSX Tiger for example work exactly the same way. I wonder though, is it useful for a user to find results this way and is there greater draw on server resources for a "continuous" search function?

E. Randy Dupre

23:06 / 23.01.06

grant> You clicked on the "See all 133 results from Yahoo! Search" link that appears at the bottom of the search results? All occurences of the word 'gnosticism' appear there (or nearly all of them, I suppose). That's what this is, really - the Yahoo search function, only given a Barbelith lick of paint and limited to the first five results.

Tryphena Absent

00:35 / 24.01.06

It took about 12 minutes to find the original real live tiger thread so not too bad considering how often that's quoted.

grant

05:17 / 24.01.06

Oh, I missed the link. That would have been handy to have noticed.

The Llama Cascade
(prev. All the strange,strange Llamas)

18:59 / 24.01.06

I'm having a small technical error with it. Everything works fine until I hit the back button on my browser (IE6). When I do this, the phrase that I previously searched remains in the search bar. If I search for this phrase again without changing the content of the search bar my browser crashes. This happens without fail each time.

sleazenation

13:19 / 15.02.06

bump

Saveloy

14:55 / 15.02.06

It's bloody brilliant. No probs here (Mozilla Firefox).

Saveloy

14:58 / 15.02.06

[rot] I note, btw, that I am the only person ever to use "oven glove" on Barbelith. [/rot]

Tom Coates

15:36 / 15.02.06

We may have fixed some of that stuff. I'll put up a revised version sometime soon...

Calabi Yau

17:43 / 21.02.06

It works perfectly fine on a modified community build 1.5.0.1 of firefox and even within an IE-tab of that browser ;0P

However, I would like to say that I would like to see google used over yahoo. I prefer google for search algorithms to yahoo, yahoo had a chinese dissident jailed, and yahoo is resorting to spyware like practices to bundle their toolbar now. So it's sort of out of principle.

Boboss

16:48 / 23.02.06

Just as a quick update. Me likey!

Tom Coates

17:27 / 23.02.06

Yeah the problem with that is that Google don't supply this kind of functionality. Also I now work for Yahoo and we developed the search functionality.

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