Usable search is top priority for drupal.org in order to provide more efficient support for drupal, and to save developers time. Good search is becoming a critical usability factor.

Drupal forums tell "please search first", but this must be a joke!. The current search in drupal.org is un-usable. The same happens on many large drupal-based sites. Google

My personal example: I was searching for the images support of the htmlarea module. No documentation is available so I've search through the site. I was flooded by the tons of non-relevant matches. How do I find matches from the last year? the last month? or to otherwise find the most up-to-date matches? On an average search, I had to scan 60-100 matches and read 10-20 of them to find the information I need. and it takes so much time! On many cases, it is much simpler to install the module and play with it before searching.

Requested feature #1: Ability to show only recent matches or sort by date would be great.

My story, continued: So I found some relevant threads, and tried to respond to them. I don't see any option to subscribe to those threads. So if I don't check the the relevant thread, I don't know if I've got a response. Where are my recent posts???

Requested feature #2: Add a usable option to see the list of my recent posts.

My story, continued: so I've search for htmlarea images. But the relevent thread talks about the UploadImage, or ImageManager, as I've discovered later. Then I searched for tagged value fields in order to find how to implement tagged-value member fields, but found so many irrelevent results! I know it exists in drupal because I have seen it in my wonderful member profile. So I sent a question in the forum, but nobody answered.

Requested feature #3: People use all kinds of terms in different ways. Search should be intelegent enough in order to search for semantic synonyms. This can have two sub-features:
3.A. Allow search to consult a predefined taxonomy that will be improved by the webmaster according to the search log files.
3.B. Find a good, free thesaurus (or thesaurus web service) and use it.
3.C. What about tagged values support? Does folksonomy or flickr have tag synonyms?

Then, I've installed the trip_search module. The advanced search offers the search-by-date functionality, but it's not part of the core, and it's not implemented in drupal.org. Also, it is hidden in the advanced search, and the module's usability needs to be greatly enhanced. So here is a fourth feature equest:

4. The search results need sorting options - by date, by node type and by user.

Comments

benshell’s picture

benshell commented

I'm surprised no one has responded to this. I agree with levavie about this. Drupal needs a better search engine, or it needs to be integrated with another open source search engine. One additional feature request I have is the ability to use quotes to search for an exact string.

I know that search engines algorithms can be extremely complicated, so I know I can't expect an open source Google, but I was just wondering what the Drupal plans are for the future of the search feature? I was thinking about trying to integrate PhpDig (http://www.phpdig.net) with Drupal. I used PhpDig on my site before I switched to Drupal, and it seems to be a pretty good search engine. It's also GNU/GPL. The big downside to PhpDig is that it still doesn't seem to have a limit to how far it will crawl per cron run. It might not be too difficult to add that feature though.

sepeck’s picture

sepeck commented

There has been a lot of search improvement from 4.4 to 4.5 to 4.6. I believe that there is more to come. If the built in search is insufficient, then you can use the contributed module trip_search. If that is insufficient you can code your own module. If your module works out as you hope to, then feature migration is always a posibility.

So, start coding or it won't get done on your schedule.

Bèr Kessels’s picture

Bèr Kessels commented
Priority: Critical » Normal

Please note that "critical" means it is critical for Drupal, not for you. Marking this "normal".

cosmicdreams’s picture

cosmicdreams commented

though this issue is from 2005 I think it is still relevant. Searching on drupal.org still has a lot of room for improvement. Providing different search options based on the timelyness of posts is a good idea.

I'm in a daze with all these issues and can't remember how searching is today on drupal.org. Can someone help me out?

sepeck’s picture

sepeck commented
Status: Active » Fixed

Do a search, if you don't like the results, click the advanced search field set on that page
http://drupal.org/search/node

Lots of options. This was in regards to the old search module. Closing.

Anonymous’s picture

(not verified) commented
Status: Fixed » Closed (fixed)

Automatically closed -- issue fixed for two weeks with no activity.

Project: » Lost & found issues

This issue’s project has disappeared. Most likely, it was a sandbox project, which can be deleted by its maintainer. See the Lost & found issues project page for more details. (The missing project ID was 3213)