Inadequate forum search facilities

harrrrrry

Despite the promise of a forthcoming Elastic Search, the search facilities are still very primitive.

In particular, these features seem to be missing:

it's not possible for a member to search for a keyword or phrase within their own posts
it's not possible to search for occurrences of a keyword or phrase within the current thread

It's also unclear what the search is intended to cover. Is it just thread titles, or is it the entire post? Or is it just very buggy?

Purely as an example,

I searched for ipv6 in All Discussiions and had some results, one of which contained the word working. in the body
but searching again for ipb6 working found no results
searching for ipv6 tethering found no results, even though tethering was in the title of one of the threads returned by the first search

endorphin

harrrrrry Or is it just very buggy?

This!

searching for ipv6 tethering found no results, even though tethering was in the title of one of the threads returned by the first search

I think the search is treating ipv6 tethering as a phrase, ie "ipv6 tethering" for which if fails to find an exact match in any thread's title. The thread in question can be found by searching for ipv6 data which does appear as a phrase in the title:

However the individually occuring data in the body of the text is still highlighted as a match to the search criteria!

So it seems to regard multiple keywords as a search for the exact phrase in thread titles but is happy to return each of those keywords individually as matches in the thread body.

persco

I agree! Search is painful on Flarum. Sometimes I have to use google indexed Flarum pages and have to painfully word the search intuitively with about 30-40% chances of results.

KB search isn’t all that great either. Throws a hissy fit if you push it a little bit with combination of keywords.

To be fair Lithium wasn’t great either but it handled keyword combinations and historic results/searches better. I was hoping as Flarum was new, search would be built from scratch and work better from word go and developed as we moved along. Retrospective development with elastic search isn’t coming along any fast either. It’s frustrating sometimes.

mrjeeves

Fuse.js seems like a possible replacement, but the issue is all the searching happens server-side because you can't sent every post to the client to search through.

There is a PHP port of it here with full compatibility with the JS syntax: https://GitHub.com/loilo/Fuse

harrrrrry

endorphin I think the search is treating ipv6 tethering as a phrase

That's possible, and explains why the search as it presently stands is close to useless for all but searching a single keyword or phrase.

But phrase searches are generally expected to be surrounded by quotes. A search for plural words should be searched as two separate conditions ANDed together. It should not initiate a single phrase search without any quotes.

endorphin

harrrrrry But phrase searches are generally expected to be surrounded by quotes.

Quite!

A search for plural words should be searched as two separate conditions ANDed together.

It would be even more useful if boolean (AND, OR, NOT) searches were allowed.