When you do a search in the Forum, the results come back oldest first. Wouldn't it make sense to have the newest first? Wouldn't most people be looking for something that was said recently rather than many years ago?
There's a link to the bottom, but that's only the bottom of the first page in a multi-page result. And even then, you have to read bottom to top.
The search engine used for forum contents is the same one used for the stories content search, Sphinx.
It should be returning results according to 'relevance'. I have no control over how 'relevance' is defined.
It should be returning results according to 'relevance'.
Scanning the posting date for each result it seems to be in date sequence, oldest to newest.
No big deal. I don't use the search much.
Scanning the posting date for each result it seems to be in date sequence, oldest to newest.
I believe it's oldest to newest within relevance. The results can comprise multiple passes through the dates.
I think newest to oldest would be a lot more useful, to make it easier to tack an observation onto the latest incarnation of a thread. To me, it's not intuitive why Sphinx thinks older threads are more relevant than newer.
AJ
why Sphinx thinks older threads are more relevant than newer.
Relevance determines if a thread is to be included in the results. The order in which relevant threads are sorted has nothing to do with relevance for all the threads are relevant.
The relevant threads could have been sorted alphabetically by title, or by poster's name; but, the designers of Sphinx must have decided a chronological listing was a better option.
Relevance determines if a thread is to be included in the results.
Relevance is significant to searches with multiple search terms, particularly if they are combined with a non-exclusive or (which is the standard default for most search engines).
If you have 5 search terms, results matching 4 search terms are more relevant than results matching only 3.
If there is only one search term, yes, relevance falls out because by definition, all results are equally relevant.