Although mentioned in the other thread, I'll repeat it here: The relevance ranking of search results is useless, posting date is much more helpful. I believe the old search didn't include quotes within a post in the little blurb it shows as results. The new blurbs blend quotes and new text together so that you can't tell where one ends and another begins:

[QUOTE=cblaisd;8839727] Dispatch had told the captain that due to W&B issues he would have to remove one passenger. This is always a popular thing to do on flights to Hawai`i. After several more minutes of conversation, the captain came on the PA, apologized for the delay, and off we went. What I could pick up from overhearing (and which was later confirmed by the FA when I spoke with her) was that the Captain overrode Dispatch, but it had to get kicked upstairs somewhere. It's actually Centralized Load Planning (CLP) not Dispatch that does weight and balance calculations and supplies the flight with the weight manifest. They actually sit pretty close to Dispatch at WHQ, but the functions are very different. Regardless, there is no way for the captain to override CLP. CLP can only issue the final weight manifest if the flight is legal to depart, and UA flights cannot depart without a final weight manifest. It's much more likely that they were slightly overweight, and they determined a different way to reduce the weight by around 200 pounds, as opposed to removing a passenger. Without knowing what was causing the weight limit, it's impossible to know what they could do, but it can include burning more fuel on taxi/en route, counting children on board, or removing some cargo.

Yesterday I searched Coupon Connection to see if anyone was looking for a free car rental code. I searched for "rental" on thread title. I expected the search result to be in order of date, most recent on the top. But it wasn't; the dates were all mixed up. Totally useless for a search like this. I did discover that I could sort by last post date; this should be the default, not an option.

This thread asking for search function feedback has slid to the third page of CommunityBuzz! due to a recent lack of posts.

We're going to transfer the thread to the Technical Issues forum where it is perhaps more apropos and where it will gain more visibility.

Thanks.


___________________

Cholula
CommunityBuzz! Co-Moderator

Hi,

Still here; just awaiting some ideas and suggestions from the AZ mod meet.

Thanks

What we learned from Mikel at Webflyer and JohnMcG, the division leader at InternetBrands, was that the process of identifying and prioritizing the major issues related to the search functionality on FlyerTalk has already occurred and improvements are underway. So we chose not to confuse the matter by duplicating the effort.

JohnMcG assured us that he understands the importance of the issue and he took away the action items of following up on the process, driving it from his leadership position, and setting up a stronger communications process between IB and the FT community.

My suggestion at this point, andersIB, is to be in touch with John.

I may be late to the game, but my list:

1) Default thread search to return results by Post, not Thread. Obviously, since we are already within the thread, it's useless to return the thread URL as the sole result. Going to advanced search is just way too many mouse clicks. I want instant gratification, not this almost instant but still slightly delayed gratification. ;)

2) Sort results by Date. I, too, see little relevance to "thread relevance." Perhaps this is because it's not clear how the posts are ranked. Why does one post that contains the word "bulkead" once rated 74% while another containing the same word the same number of times rated 45%? Default the search results by date, and possibly allow a sort by username as well. This may be helpful if we're looking for a post by, say, mahasamatman.

3) The "search this forum" dropdown has radio buttons that allow you to select whether the results are returned by thread or by post. How about allowing this for the main board search dropdown as well?

4) I like the fact that you can preview a thread by floating your cursor over the result when searching threads (actually, I wish this were a feature in general not limited to searches, but that's a different topic). Why not do the same with Post results? At the very least, clean up the post results. Right now, it looks like a random middle snippet of the post is shown, oftentimes not giving me a good idea of what the result is about. I need a longer snippet, or the ability to preview the entire post.

My 4 cents.

The "beta" version of our own "Internet Brands" search engine is VERY POOR.

Please get rid of this current search function and return the former model. I have stopped using Search, and reduced my visits to FT because of the lack of a functional search tool.

This is a new problem for me. I was trying to search for all threads in the Starwood forum with "Clayton" in the title. Search pulled up all threads on FT. Then I tried for all threads with Clayton in them, again limited to Starwood. Again, search pulled up all FT threads. I could have learned a lot about Michael Clayton and not very much about the Sheraton Clayton.

Not only am I seeing the problem SanDiego1K is having with the search returning threads outside of the forum being searched, but the post dates in the search results are displaying June, 2008 dates. As far as I am concerned, the integrity of the entire engine is suspect as it is not able to return accurate results from a simple query.

Ditto for both "Search this forum" being broken AND some searches returning goofy dates -- either before the existence of the Internet (never mind the existence of FT), e.g., dates in 1969 or 1970, or after the current date, e.g., in June 2008.

Ever heard of "regression testing?" :rolleyes: OK, I guess we end users are stuck doing the regression testing.... :(

i think the search by forum died yesterday.

more at the end here >
http://flyertalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=787261

I'll chime in as well by saying that the new search is definitely a step back.

The way the results are mixed up by date and the previews mean nothing makes it useless - I am reduced no to just browsing through the recent posts and if what I am looking for isn't there I just give up.

Fix 'Search in this forum'!
If it will take a while to fix, how about a google search that will let us do the same thing?

There must be a lot of wasteful duplication going on while the old questions, discussions and topics remain unfound by the broken search feature.

Please fix "search in this forum". It certainly implies that it works, but for me, it returned 20 threads, none of which were from the forum in question. Only by finding this thread did I figure out that what used to be a very good thing (search) had gone bad.

Bring back the old search until this one works reasonably.

I clicked on 'find posts by' xxxxx for someone just now and the first post date was: Jan 9, 1970 12:19 AM

When clicking on the message it is apparent the post is from today.

Bizarre!

Why is the search function performing so poorly?