 We're trialling a new search engine on OM, initially in the Gear, Travel, OTH and Reviews section. We think it's a lot better than before so have a play and let us know what you think using this forum thread. It will, eventually, if successful, be extended site wide to cover the forum, gallery and so on. Enjoy 
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 Well, I searched for Lord Lucan and nothing came up... but now it should!
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...except that evidently it doesn't search the forums yet  So Lord Lucan is still not to be found...
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 Nor Shergar either! 
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Lord Lucan is no longer a contributor to OM. Or Shergar for that matter...
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 How do you know that, Jon? I'm sure Shergar's been posting on the windy thread regularly!
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 can you sort the results? it brings things up in what appears a random order. boolean operators please.
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 One of my "not yet written" tales... I was once looking at various walks close to the Border in Ireland and I was taken to a place where local folk believe Shergar was dumped. Now, I only have their word for it, but it seemed plausible at the time. I gather a search was mounted, but the location was so unsafe (a pit prone to collapse) that no-one got far enough to be sure one way or the other. As for my "written" stories near the Border... No sooner were my articles in print than two arms dumps and an underground firing range were discovered beside my walking routes!
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If you do have feedback, it would help if you could be as precise as possible. So, if for the sake of argument, you search for Shergar and it brings up 200 articles, but the only one with 'Shergar' in the title is listed on page six of the results then it's a lot more helpful to the tech guys to tell them that, than simply saying 'searching for Shergar is rubbish'. Like I said above, it is a beta, but even in beta form, it's still significantly better than the search function was before and with refinement, it should be much, much better. Thanks
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 Just made some changes, so the results should be sorted better now. They are ordered by the strength of keyword matches, which get scored most highly in the title, then the standfirst, then the body content of the article. Hopefully later, we'll introduce other methods for sorting such as date. Thanks,
Dave
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.jpg) I Searched for 'Braithwaite' and found exactly what I wanted in the first 2 results.
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 I have a rather techincal complaint. The search engine does not handle UTF-8 input. On my computer I use UTF-8 encoding, and when I search for "haglöfs" I get no results and the ö (o with umlaut) gets garbled. Encoding issues are awful. Excerpts from the articles where the search terms were encountered are presented in the search results. It would look a lot better if you added ellipses (...) before and after the texts. I have to say the search engine is working really well. You seem to have a linguistic filter and a good selection of skip and split characters. If you wanted to be really helpful, you could add a fuzzy spellcheck that kicks in if you don't get any results. But perhaps that's overkill. Since my job is to develop search indexes, I can't help but ask which search engine you are using?
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Hi Oscar, thanks for the feedback! I'm going to take a look at the encoding issues this week and will hopefully have a fix in place for UTF-8 encoding. Spell checking is also in the pipeline, along with Boolean search operators. Dave
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Spell checking is also in the pipeline, along with Boolean search operators. Dave
Yay!! for Boolean!
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Since you seem to have unlimited development time on your hands (lovely) I could also suggest trunk searching as a fallback when no results are found. It is very important to have lower relevance on a trunk hit, otherwise the results will suck. Is the choice of search engine a secret?
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Thanks for the feedback Oscar, I will take a look at trunk searching. Boolean searching should now also be in place; you may use AND, OR, NOT, and parentheses. Eg. (Climbing AND Fitness) NOT shoes I'm afraid I can't give too many technical details away until I get the OK from the higher powers
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| Edited: 09/06/08 10:21 |
Boolean searching should now also be in place; you may use AND, OR, NOT, and parentheses. Eg. (Climbing AND Fitness) NOT shoes
Dave, you are a gent and a scholar.
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I would recommend having a fancier error page. Try searching for something incorrect like "foo)". It could be nice to do the search in a GET instead of a POST. That way members could share URLs to search results. In some articles the editors use "foreign" characters such as ö, and in some they don't. For example Haglöfs can be found searching either for "haglofs" or "haglöfs". If you have a synonym system in place you could add å -> a, ä -> a and ö -> o rules, and probably a few others as well. Those were the Swedish characters. You have an issue with HTML entities that are double encoded. Search for "haglofs e" and have a look at hit three. Same thing with hit six. You have an issue with blank characters that get eaten. In the same search as above ("haglofs e"), in hit seven you can see it in "'sjust" and "forwardin". Where you do the highlighting of the search term in hit eight you have the same thing. Hey, you don't need a testing crew when you've got me! My bet would be that you're using Sharepoint ...
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Hi Oscar, Thanks for spotting the errors; i need to put some checks into the Boolean parser to spot missing brackets. We do a POST instead of a GET because we're using .net to manage the page. However, I have put into place a SEO-based url system that can be used to share searches. For example, if you did a search for "climbers" the url would be http://www.outdoorsmagic.com/search/articles/climbers and if you restricted this to the gear news category, the url would become http://www.outdoorsmagic.com/search/articles/climbers/category/_gear+news_ Just hover over the search facets, and you'll see what I mean. We may add a "share this search url" later. Im currently working on the missing spaces and encoding issues, so these should be fixed as the search system progresses. cheers,
Dave
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Sometimes the "evil techies" aren't so bad after all, huh? <runs away quickly before he comes back>
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