Is it possible to change how the results are sorted when searching the Forum so they are sorted from recent to oldest date? Right now when I do a search in the forum the results are shown from oldest date to recent date.
Is it possible to change how the results are sorted when searching the Forum so they are sorted from recent to oldest date? Right now when I do a search in the forum the results are shown from oldest date to recent date.
I asked for this a while back. Lazeez said he uses a tool to do the sorting and the results are not oldest first like it seems, but triggered by frequency or something like that.
Nevertheless it seems perverse that results of equal relevance are returned oldest first rather than newest first.
I guess it sells more advertising when people have to wade through more pages before hey find what they want.
AJ
I guess it sells more advertising when people have to wade through more pages before hey find what they want.
It has nothing to do with advertising. Lets say you have three search words. What the search algorithm does is first search for all posts with all three search words in the order you entered them. Then with a different order, them with only the first two search words, etc. etc. Relevance in a pretty basic way. You can try to change the order of your search words ensuring that the most important one is first.
That said, it does seem that results with the same top relevance score are in reversed date order. IIRC the Sphinx search engine is used, at least for text searches in stories. Not sure it it's also used for the forum posts and I don't know how many of the search features are implemented. I haven't tried if something like "Mary had * * lamb" works. (http://www.sphinxsearch.com/docs/sphinx3.html#searching-query-syntax)
it does seem that results with the same top relevance score are in reversed date order.
I'll give you all an example where that happened.
On Oct 30, 2021, I did a search on "Halloween contest" so that I could recommend that Lazeez put up the yellow information line to notify people that the contest entries were ready to read. (For the 2021 contest.)
What I didn't realize was, the thread I got back as the first result in my search and the thread I posted on was from 2015. It wasn't until @BlacKnight posted the following that I realized it:
BlacKnight 10/30/2021, 1:33:03 PM
@Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)
We're having a story writing contest. Check it out:
https://storiesonline.net/contest/Halloween-2015
Have fun everybody.
Have I not noticed that I'm in a do-over, or is that the wrong year?
The search does seem to put the oldest ones first.
Nevertheless it seems perverse that results of equal relevance are returned oldest first rather than newest first.
Or your choice of keywords was not optimal and the older results are technically more relevant than the one you were looking for.
From usage, it's obvious that you get search results of the most relevance oldest first, then less relevance oldest first and sometimes least relevance oldest first.
Three (possibly more) discrete tranches of results, each returned oldest first.
AJ
Right now when I do a search in the forum the results are shown from oldest date to recent date.
If I'm not mistaking they are sorted by relevance. If you scroll down you will see mixed up dates. I agree that even then it seems like the older posts come up first.
thanks for the info! sucks having to go through posts from years ago when you know what you're looking for was more recent...oh well, tis what it tis...
sucks having to go through posts from years ago when you know what you're looking for was more recent
Yes, but if you just resorted the results by date, instead of wading through old posts, you would have to wade through potentially lots of low relevance posts.
For example, if you did a search with three key words and sorted results by date, there could be two dozen threads that only match one keyword before you get to the one you want.
What you really want is not sorting by date, but the ability to add a date range to the query itself.
What you really want is not sorting by date, but the ability to add a date range to the query itself.
Now, that would be a really good addition. Maybe something like only results from the last week, month, or year.