118
votes
Extremely basic search added
Okay, okay. We really needed some sort of search, so I decided to just get an extremely basic version out today. It's very limited, but it should work for now and can be improved as we go forward.
Details/limitations:
- Currently, the search only includes the title and the text of the post (if it's a text topic). It doesn't include the tags, the group, the link, the author name, comments, anything. Only the title and text right now.
- There's no way to restrict the search to specific group(s) yet. Just full-site search.
- All searches are "all of these words". There's no phrase-searching yet, or "X or Y", or anything else.
- The search results page is just a quick hack on the normal topic listing page and will probably display some things weirdly in some cases (like the message when there's no results).
It's a start though, and certainly better than not having any search at all. There will probably be a lot of minor issues, but let me know if you notice anything especially broken with it.
Sorry can someone explain? Is this related to the topic of search? Or some kind of inside joke?
We already have meme culture! Watch out reddit.
Looks like I'm already in desperate need of an ~outoftheloop.
Haha I remember that comment
It was really neat to reload the page and see the search bar appear out of the corner of my eye. Thanks for all the awesome work you're doing @Deimos!
FINALLY!
Awesome! Thank you Deimos. One step closer to abandoning reddit altogether.
Great work getting this done, even a basic search will be a massive usability boost during the beta.
Hate to sound pedantic, but Tildes is currently in alpha. It's only something like 120 days old.
It's great to have this already, this early. I expected it wouldn't be available for a lot longer than this.
Ah you're right, it is in alpha. I just keep thinking of it as a closed beta. I wasn't expecting any search for ages either, definitely a great addition.
Just tested that sucker out. It may not be perfect, but it doesn't have to be right now. Thank you for the basic search! :)
Interesting. I've been testing out partial- versus full-word searching and I've been getting some strange results.
Searching for "psych" does not return posts with "psychology" or "psychiatry". There's only one post that contains "psych". Okay: it's a full-word match, and doesn't match on partial words.
But when I tried the same test on "stream" and "streaming", I noticed something strange. Searching for "streaming" returns posts that do not contain "streaming", but do contain "stream" - like this one.
Similarly for "social" and "socialism". Searching for "socialism" returns this post containing the word "social" but not "socialism".
That general concept is called "stemming". It's customizable, but there's some default behavior that tries to reduce words down to their "stems". I'm pretty sure that this is the method used by default (the top section is hard to follow, but there's some info about how suffixes are treated further down). It really depends on the specific words for how well it works.
For example, both "psychology" and "psychological" get reduced down to the same stem, but "psychologist" doesn't.
Wouldn't it be simpler, and more obvious to users, to just make it a full-word match? You search for "stream" and you get results that match exactly on "stream" (and not "streaming"). You search for "streaming" and you get results that match exactly on "streaming" (and not "stream").
Seeing results for "social" when you search for "socialism" is quite unexpected.
It varies, I don't think either is clearly better.
If someone searches for "gardening", it would usually be good to also have it find threads like "Does anyone have a garden?", "What do you all grow in your gardens?", and "Is anyone a gardener?" instead of making users manually search for every variant they can think of. Hopefully the tagging system can help with this too, but stemming is very useful in a lot of cases.
I'll have to look into it, but it should be possible to fix specific stemming errors, which would let me do things like disable "socialism" being converted to "social".
It's supposed to be a simple bare-bones search tool, so I think people will understand if a search for "gardening" doesn't return matches for "garden", "gardens", or "gardener". Although, having a partial-word search might mitigate the problem: someone can search for "garden" to see matches on "gardening", "gardens", and "gardener". That's a common enough implementation that people would understand what's happening.
I suppose I see predictability as more important for this feature than flexibility. As you say, it's ultimately just about personal preference.
Excellent work - this is a huge value-add!
That's great, thanks!
Awesome! Great to see this site keep developing!
Thanks for search!!!
Just one piece of tiny feedback: on mobile the search button might be a little too wide in relation to the input. It wasn’t obvious what was going on to my eyes due to that.
Edit: just a tiny bit of margin between the buttons might make it more obvious.
Just the margin-right looks better to me. The gap makes the input more clear, and the margin on the input makes the Search button the tiny bit smaller that I was looking for.
This is with margin-right: .5rem; on the input: https://i.imgur.com/Nh0OD23.png
I'm not sure if that looks better for everyone, but it does for me.
Hopefully this will help with cataloging some of the older frequently asked questions so people don't need to repost them.
Fantastic! Thank you for your hard work, as always.
As an aside, if there a way to know if we have been given the limited mod privileges you talked about a few days ago? I posted in the thread, but unless I'm missing something, I'm not seeing anything different when I open a post, on mobile at least.
Edit: Thanks for the fast responses, everyone! I don't post topics often, so I didn't notice Tag and Edit links, or lack thereof, in other's posts.
I've been sending everyone a PM when I add permissions for them. I've been doing it pretty slowly though and haven't gone through all the comments and messages yet, so if you haven't heard from me yet it doesn't necessarily mean anything.
If you look under one of your own topics, you'll see small bold links that say "Tag" and "Move", which allow you to tag or move your own topic. If you look under someone else's topic and you see the same "Tag" and/or "Move" links, then you have the ability to edit those tags or move that topic.
There's no other indicator. There's nothing on our profiles, or in our settings, to tell us we have this ability.
There's a request for and discussion on that.
That link doesn't work for me: it returns a "404" page.
A future planned feature won't tell MangoTiger whether they have modding abilities now.
Link fixed.
Obviously, and I didn't say it would.
MangoTiger wasn't asking whether they could possibly find out at some future time about their moderation abilities. They want to know if they have the abilities now, after having responded to Deimos' thread the other day.
Linking that issue was the only response you gave to MangoTiger's question, which implies that there's no way to tell now, and the only option is to wait until the feature is built.
Thanks for putting this together!