[nadreg]

Hi all,

I've developed a new search engine for the IndiaMike site, which hopefully should do a better job than the current one we have. This is the first-cut of the search engine, so please keep in mind that it might not be completely stable and will need some tweaks.

I'd love to get your feedback on the quality of the search results, though, as well as the overall display and look-and-feel.

Here's the link: http://www.indiamike.com/india-search

Please respond with your thoughts and comments in this thread.

Thanks!

[Nick-H]

Hmmm...

Tried it with "register office". Out of the first five results, only the first contained the phrase 'register office'. They may have contained 'register' or 'office' but a search that puts an OR between the words of a phrase is not very useful.

They also seem to come up in random order of date.

[karuna]

Aren't you already married, Nick?!

Try putting "quote marks" around the term.

[Swapnil]

It'll be nice to know total no. of search results found & also results found in each category.
I believe search results displayed in descending order depending upon thread score . May I know how this score is calculated

[Nick-H]

Quote marks might work, but really shouldn't be needed, and most people would not think about it.

Quote marks are for 'I really don't want millions of pages of anything else tagged on the end'.

Else... there should be an option to search for entire phrase only

Google gets into assuming OR if it can't find the phrase, or si still churning out results thousands of pages later. People do not expect to see the words split up within the first handful of results.

[nadreg]

Originally Posted by Nick-H

Hmmm...

Tried it with "register office". Out of the first five results, only the first contained the phrase 'register office'. They may have contained 'register' or 'office' but a search that puts an OR between the words of a phrase is not very useful.

They also seem to come up in random order of date.

The search attempts to find the terms in close proximity, but will look for them further apart if it can't find it. Also, the engine matches against the text within the thread as well as the title, so the searched text may not be readily evident when looking through the results initially.

[nadreg]

Originally Posted by Swapnil

It'll be nice to know total no. of search results found & also results found in each category.

I'll see what I can do about that. I'm not sure if this would be very easy to do.

Originally Posted by Swapnil

I believe search results displayed in descending order depending upon thread score . May I know how this score is calculated

The score is generated by the engine itself, and is a calculation based on relevance of the content to the search text. The higher the score, the more relevant the content. I should remove the score itself, since it can be confusing.

[capt_mahajan]

The good part is that Masala Chai seems part of the search now

They also seem to come up in random order of date.

The bad part. One big advantage over google search indiamike has (had?) so far is that the results are reverse chronological

[Nattusbs]

Hi Nadreg

Very good idea, I looked at the link and typed 'dog travel' - I did not have the quotes (used it here only to denote what I had put in for the search), did not use any thing like + or AND or any such feature.

Got the following:

http://www.indiamike.com/indiamike.c...rchdocument.do

One thing I notice is that there is no chronological order. it might be that the search strings are looking first for relevance. A little bit of tweaking will be useful so that relevance and chronological order can be combined.

I will try some more examples.

Cheers

Nattusbs

[Haylo]

Results seem random in terms of dates, which is definitely a step backwards from the existing search engine, especially for anyone searching for information which quickly becomes out of date, for instance the latest information on visas.

It was a bit of a nuisance having to tick and untick a number of boxes to get to the forum search. I realised quickly what to do but it wasn't intuitive and the default seemed to be to search for everything.

Another function that seems to be missing is to search only in one particular forum, eg to search only the Delhi forum for "restaurants".

I think that what the existing search function really needs to improve it is a "search for exact phrase" option, and a few paragraphs explaining how to use it, and pointing out functions such as "search within this thread" which I hadn't noticed when first joining this site.

The "masala chai and chat" not being searchable had been previously said, I thought, to be a deliberate decision to prevent people for searching for deliberately provocative subjects, but maybe that was incorrect?

Sorry this all seems so negative!

[nadreg]

Originally Posted by capt_mahajan

One big advantage over google search indiamike has (had?) so far is that the results are reverse chronological

Adding a sort option is something I was thinking about. Currently, the default sort option is by relevance. So it's threads/articles that are deemed to be a "best fit".

I'm collecting suggestions right now, and am trying to get a sense of which features would be most beneficial.

[nadreg]

Hi all,

I've made some more changes to the test search functionality. The biggest change being the addition of a time option to the search results.

Now, you can limit your search to a specific time period (24 hours, 1 week, 6 months, etc). This works very similar to the way Google allows you to filter search results.

[*jyoti*]

I looked up dehra dun site seeing, and the first five hits were about har ki dun... A few other random searches did ok, tho. Better than the previous!

[Haylo]

Originally Posted by nadreg

Now, you can limit your search to a specific time period (24 hours, 1 week, 6 months, etc). This works very similar to the way Google allows you to filter search results.

That is already a feature of the existing advanced search, but if this new search is going to replace the "basic" search that's great, and I do prefer the layout of the box on the right, it's a lot clearer.

BUT - is this new search intended to replace the existing advanced search?

If so it has a greatly reduced functionality and there are a lot of features that I'd miss, for instance being able to search on specific forums, search specifically for thread content vs title only, and being able to see from the results which forum the search results had been posted in, how many results there were &c.

[nadreg]

Originally Posted by *jyoti*

I looked up dehra dun site seeing, and the first five hits were about har ki dun... A few other random searches did ok, tho. Better than the previous!

I did the same search, and I see the results that you're seeing. If you click into the results, though, you will see that there are a lot of references to dehra dun in the thread itself. Basically, the new search checks the title as well as all the posts in the thread itself. This can lead to some seemingly strange results, however.

If you do see strange results, I suggest you add quotes around the term. So search for "dehra dun" instead of dehra dun.