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Forum Search Improvement
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Jake

Toodledo Founder
Posted: Oct 02, 2014
Score: 0 Reference
One of the contributors to our recent outage was the intensive computation that is caused by searching for topics in our forums. On top of that, our search accuracy wasn't even that good. So, we are scrapping our old forum search functionality and replacing it with a new forum search powered by Google.

Google is smarter than we are at search, so we have no doubt that this change will be an improvement to finding topics in our forums.
aromweis

Posted: Oct 03, 2014
Score: 0 Reference
When will this new Search mechanism be available? I just tried using the Google Custom Search, and while it returns a list of hits, when I click on the hit link, all that comes up is a blank Search window. This seems to happen for all returned hits.
Jake

Toodledo Founder
Posted: Oct 03, 2014
Score: 0 Reference
It is working for me, so maybe it is your browser. What browser are you using?
aromweis

Posted: Oct 03, 2014
Score: 0 Reference
Thanks for the quick reply.

I am using Firefox on Windows 7. More info: I just realized that if the hit link starts with "Toodledo : Forums :: Search ::" with some extra text, clicking on that brings up a blank page. A hit that starts with anything else - i.e. "Toodledo : Forums : Questions :" plus extra text - works fine.

My search string is "android reschedule subtask" and most of the hits returned are of the first kind (i.e. with Search in the link) and lead to blank pages.
aromweis

Posted: Oct 03, 2014
Score: 0 Reference
Actual examples:

Leads to blank page:
Toodledo : Forums :: Search :: Posted by Purveyor

Leads to forum post:
Toodledo : Forums : Questions : We want an official Android app !!!
allendr59

Posted: Oct 03, 2014
Score: 0 Reference
I'm useing Chrome and have noticed the same results.

Posted by aromweis:
Thanks for the quick reply.

I am using Firefox on Windows 7. More info: I just realized that if the hit link starts with "Toodledo : Forums :: Search ::" with some extra text, clicking on that brings up a blank page. A hit that starts with anything else - i.e. "Toodledo : Forums : Questions :" plus extra text - works fine.

My search string is "android reschedule subtask" and most of the hits returned are of the first kind (i.e. with Search in the link) and lead to blank pages.
coolexplorer

Posted: Oct 04, 2014
Score: 0 Reference
PROBLEM : In Chrome, when I clicked on "Search" it showed the Title "Search Toodledo Forums" and the rest of the page was blank.
SOLVED : by temporarily disabling Ghostery service which was blocking the Google search widget. Will now have to identify the widget service and white-list it.

PROBLEM: Previous Toodledo in-house search options allowed for viewing only the latest "this weeks" forum comments. How to replicate that in the Google search window?


This message was edited Oct 04, 2014.
Jake

Toodledo Founder
Posted: Oct 04, 2014
Score: 0 Reference
I see now. It looks like Google has indexed results from our old search page and has not updated their index yet to remove these no longer existing pages. This should clean itself up when Google crawls our site next, but I'll see if I can fix it quicker.

You can sort your search results by date by clicking the "Sort by" button in the top right corner of the search results page.
coolexplorer

Posted: Oct 05, 2014
Score: 0 Reference
Posted by Jake:
You can sort your search results by date by clicking the "Sort by" button in the top right corner of the search results page.

Doesn't work properly, dates not mentioned for each comment, and shows entire categories rather than only most recent individual comments (which worked in Toodledo's in-house search facility).
Could incorporating "Googles Search Tools Button" make it work as it shows by "Any time, past hour, 24 hours, week, month", etc?
Salgud

Posted: Oct 06, 2014
Score: 0 Reference
Interesting discussion. I was curious about the double colon (::) some of you used in your searches,as I hadn't run across that before. While I'm certainly far from a Google search expert, I do use it fairly extensively to search my Gmail (if there's one thing most everyone can agree on about Gmail, it's that it's great at hiding mail you know is there, somewhere). I did a google search for the :: in google search, but didn't find any mention of it. So I did 2 searches:
toodledo:forums:search:dependencies
and
toodledo:forums::search::dependencies

The results were almost exactly the same. In fact, the first 2 pages of results were exactly the same. The only difference I could find was the number of search results, which was 904 for the single colon search, and 905 for the double colon search. (I didn't take the time to look through all of them to find that one unique result for the :: search)
So I'm interested in knowing what the difference is.


This message was edited Oct 06, 2014.
allendr59

Posted: Oct 06, 2014
Score: 0 Reference
Posted by Salgud:
Interesting discussion. I was curious about the double colon (::) some of you used in your searches,as I hadn't run across that before.


I was only searching on single terms, so didn't use a colon at all. That's just what it returned. But now that you mention it, I have noticed the double colon in other queries before - I wonder if this is a sql or java query formatting thing?
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