Minor search update: topic tags are now included in search
Not a very major update, but I figured it was worth letting everyone know: search has been expanded a bit to also cover topics' tags in addition to their title and markdown (for text topics). So if you search for a term that was only included in a topic's tags but not its title/text, it should come up in the results now.
On that subject, are there any other pieces of data that you think should be included by default in search? In the future, I'd like to support searching certain parts of data deliberately (for example, maybe by writing a query like url:article to find only link topics with "article" in their url), but that's different from including it automatically in all searches. As a specific example, if you search for "youtube.com" or even "youtube", should all link topics from YouTube come up, or only topics that have the word "youtube" somewhere in their title/text/tags?
I think adding custom syntax for domain specific searches, e.g.
domain:youtube.com. would probably be best since if all the submissions from youtube showed up in the results foryoutubeoryoutube.com, that would make it almost impossible/harder to search for topics about youtube.Topic titles, self-text and tags all showing up in results from regular strings makes intuitive sense though.
p.s. Quotation marks for exact searches would be nice eventually too, e.g. "exact string", as would AND (+), OR (/) and NOT (-) operators as well since they can all really help narrow down results.
What about if it required searching the whole domain name? So searching "youtube" = posts with youtube in title/text/tags, but searching "youtube.com" = posts that link to youtube.com? I don't know if there's any case where you'd want to search a full domain name where that would be undesirable behavior.
I think allowing the user to override such guesses (in this case we're guessing that they most probably want to search for a domain if they entered sth. that parses as a domain name) is important. Something that we can not imagine now can be necessary for someone in the future, especially as the amount of content grows. I personally like the mairix syntax which I use for searching mail, e.g., adapting to tildes:
t:title; g:tags tags tags; c:text content; l:link (domain + path); d:domain name; -u:user1 (negated); +u:user2 (required); @2018-09-09:today (date range); v>:12 (vote lower bound); v<:10 (vote upper bound); v=:10 (vote count); ~group; !cutsl (flags for comment, usernames, topics, text topics, link topics). I know it looks ugly and complex, but it's useful. If that's too bad, something like reddit's advanced search would suffice too.I can't think of too many scenarios where you would be looking for
youtube.comin the title/self-text/tags as opposed to the domain results or vice versa withyoutube, however there are edge cases which is why Google doesn't make a strict distinction between them and treats them as generally synonymous.e.g. searching for
youtube.com alternativebrings up mixed results from youtube itself with "alternative" in them and links discussing alternatives to youtube. Howeversite:youtube.com alternativeonly brings up results from youtube itself with "alternative" in them, and"youtube.com alternative"only brings up links discussing alternatives to youtube.So with exact string quotations and domain specific search syntax you avoid leaving too many unqueryable edge cases, and with AND OR NOT you can allow for even more specificity, removing even more.
Just earlier today I searched for gizmodo.com to see if domain search worked and had no luck so I'd say domain results for sure should be included, I use domain results to see if a source I have is a source that others have submitted as sort of a go/no-go for if I will submit from that domain.
I'd like to see search expanded to comments. Maybe user could choose if he wants to see post results or comment results with button in search results that switches the view. It would be nice to have something like
Maybe search result highlighting in the result body would be great feature.
I don't know if it's aleeady a feature, but
author:Soptikwould be nice.Limited user history is bug or a feature? I think Deimos said he'll eventually add pagination, I'm not sure if he decided against it.