Apeiron

A common complaint is that searching turns up too many results, and its too hard to find the few threads with the useful technical info you're looking for. It also doesn't help when a lot of threads start with "How do I..?", followed only by a "Do a search". After the pattern repeats itself for a few years, there are dozens of threads instructing the original poster to search for the one useful post.

What would it take to have a "search by relevance" feature? What I'm thinking is that users could mark individual posts or threads as "relevant" or "useful", and those posts would be returned higher on the search list.

The concept could be extended to users as well. Users could be voted to be "relevant" or "useful", and posts made by high-scoring users would be more likely to be found higher up on the search results. It could also lead to member titles being based on something more significant than just post count.

John in RI

iTrader: (167)

True - but every time the search stops working we ALL wish we had the problem of it returning more than we need. I'd rather pick thru 25 posts to find the info I need rather than have nothing to search thru ! ! !

It's better to narrow the search with added criteria / search terms than to return less results based on ....... anything ! Voting members as "relevant" sounds like you will be limiting users; people that know one area (Body work) may no nothing about others (Setting rear end gears).


My opinion is that there should be NO LIMTS.

Apeiron

It's not limiting anything, just changing the order they're returned in. You still get the same results returned, just the items that are more likely to be useful are returned closer to the top. Its just a way of making the cream rise to the top, so to speak.

As far as rating users goes, their area of expertise wouldn't matter so much. Someone who makes knowledgeable posts about body work can be just as highly rated as someone who makes posts about rear end gears. There's not much overlap in the search terms for those two subjects, so there's no need to be worried about it. The idea would be that you'd see good posts by someone like the esteemed Mr. Vader, for example, at the top of the search results, while posts by therckid are buried somewhere below the 300th page of results.

Of course, it goes without saying that returning results ranked by relevance would be a search option, not a mandatory feature of every search.

Kevin91Z

iTrader: (1)

I'd like to see good threads made as sticky posts. But there's still no guarantee people will actually read them.
I made a "best headers/best exhaust" sticky post in the exhaust forum a while back, and I still get people asking what headers they should buy for their car.

2tonedmaro89

if they want relevance all they have to do is quote it and it only brings up the exact words that were typed...like you would on yahoo or google to find something more specific

Azrael91966669

every time i try to do a search as soon as i find a thread that sounds like what ever problem I'm having the only topics that show up have "do a search" as the 1st few replies its annoying . and if I'm in the middle of something i don't always have the time to sit here for an hours going through all the topics that ended up being useless

the one i really love is tbi to tpi swap and issues
everyone says the tech article is so detailed but its not and no one wants to answer anything related to the subject other then "do a search"
or "should have just got a tpi car to start with"
maybe people should stop over using the "do a search" reply

Kevin91Z

iTrader: (1)

You dont want to take an hour to go thru the 300 posts that a search gives you, yet you want us to spend an hour replying the same answer to all 300 posts each time the question is asked? I dont think so.

Randy82WS7

well search getting taken down often doesnt help much with the ppl asking common questions


i got lost in the first reply

i guess i need to try again

lol