I use (used) this a lot. Like the ability to explore archived conversations. The old version was not great; the new version is so terrible it is almost worse than no search function (sorry to be so blunt). Folks have made some suggestions for how to piggy back onto google to search this site:
But I would like to think that there would be a (fairly straightforward/free?) way to upgrade the internal search function here so that we could get back at least to the level of service (LOS) we had before the recent switch.
Thanks very much!
Thanks for reading.
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If you click the search icon (magnifying glass), and then click again in the empty search box without any search terms in it, it opens up a simple, empty search form on this page:
http://bikeportland.org/?s=
Interesting. Thanks for the tip. Do you find that this leads you to better results? Is there an advanced feature that this page includes which I’m not seeing? Because with the searches that I’ve tried (post the switch) I get hundreds of what appear to be unsorted results, that treat my search phrase string as word 1 or word 2 or word 3 or word 4. The prior search function seemed to look for posts with all of the phrases in them and although the sorting wasn’t super obvious I do think there was some ‘relevance’ coefficient built in.
I get those unsorted results, too. I’m not sure what engine is behind this new form, but the old one was the Google engine and its algorithms, and that’s pretty hard to beat.
Thanks for this feedback, 9watts. I’ve passed it on.