"Forum Search" up the spout?

[#1]

Quote from: jelv

The PUG forums are using SMF which is the same as these forums, why does search appear to work over there but not here?

These forums are fairly heavily modded for styling etc, so it's possible something got messed up during the recoding.

[#2]

Does this need a PUGIT (Plusnet User Group Issue Tracker) item submitting to keep it on the radar, give it exposure and a formal timed review process?
http://usergroup.plus.net/pugit/
(probably needs an account creating there to see the page)
Mike

[#3]

Can someone try searching for something...

[#4]

Still broken. Bananas are the way forward.

[#5]

Quote from: James_H

Bananas retrieves just this thread......

A search for "banana" brings back several threads, all of which have "banana" in them, but that works even when no boards are selected to search from. I wonder what results come up if you search on no boards for a word that's only ever been used once on the forum.
Extraterestrialspacehoppingbunnies
EDIT: It only brings back the one thread.

[#6]

It's probably designed to do that so that people don't get confused

[#7]

Quote from: Colin

It's probably designed to do that so that people don't get confused

Doh, you're right Still, I wonder why some search terms work and others don't (if you do a search for "SIP" on all boards it brings back random responses, but "banana" and "extraterestrialspacehoppingbunnies" brings back the correct threads)

[#8]

Maybe 'sip' is too short a word, so it returns all posts.  Try a search on other three letter words?
B.

[#9]

Quote from: Barry

Maybe 'sip' is too short a word, so it returns all posts.  Try a search on other three letter words? B.

Interesting point Barry. I just tried "Timer" and "Skype" and they are better, but they still are trailed with irrelevant posts at the end.

[#10]

Could it be that the threads after a certain date are now being searched correctly, and earlier ones are still broken?
Could it be corruption in the search index database (if there is such a thing)?
Barry - My original problems were with "drupal" (and others had problems searching for "metronet"), so it doesn't sound like search length is the factor here.
(Although you are right, that often 2 and 3 letter searches are broken on most fora... but come back saying "no results found" rather than finding many that don't have the phrase!).
Mike

[#11]

Just so you know Colin, the search works fine on the beta comms forum.

[#12]

Quote from: xpcomputers

Does this need a PUGIT (Plusnet User Group Issue Tracker) item submitting to keep it on the radar, give it exposure and a formal timed review process? Mike

Now raised as PUGIT 369 as an 'annoyance' - This should mean that you can vote for the issue without needing to complete the 'Prefs' screen.
MauriceC

[#13]

BTW - we've actually been talking to SMF about this issue through our support contacts with them.
We haven't touched any aspects of the Search code, so I'm a bit confused as to why it's not performing very well.
If anyone does have any ideas, we'd be pleased to here them... as I've tried all the options I can see

[#14]

I've tried searches on the Community Beta site and, as mentioned earlier by MikeWhitehead, searches there do work fine.

[#15]

My first suggestion is to check the unicode settings on the mysql server, the database, and the tables and ensure that they adhere to the specification that smf have published.
Second, determine which index is responsible for the full text search, and drop and recreate it.
It is sounding like a corrupted search index more and more, especially because the beta site works fine.
I'm assuming that it's running on a mysql db server.  Perhaps determining the query used to generate the results page, then manually running the query through the mysql client using 'explain'  would shed some light on which indices are the likely suspect.
B.