Search not working right

[klortho]

Hi, Roddy, 对不起, 我给你添了麻烦,

I tried to search for 语素, and got a results page with only one thread, this one: http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/5-how-many-characters-do-you-know041. It should have shown this one, too: http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/47-colloquial-chinese75.

[gougou]

I get three results, the two you mentioned plus this thread we're currently writing in.

[roddy]

That's 'coz I fixed it

At least I think I did. The post which wasn't showing up had the target phrase like this

"语素yu3su4"

with no space, so I think the search function was regarding that all as one word. I stuck a space in in one of the occurences, and that post now comes up when you search for 语素.

If you ever can't find something with the in-house search function and you know it's there, you might find Google works better, certainly for anything more than a few weeks old.

[klortho]

Sorry to be a boor, but, do you really think that's adequate? I tried the same search from Google, and got even worse results that from this site's search bar.

I really appreciate this site very much, so I hope you're not offended by this criticism -- but it seems that one of the main benefits of a forum is it's searchability. And, of course, this forum in particular has a lot of Chinese content. So, I'd say that it's pretty important that this forum's Chinese search feature be pretty powerful. I know I use it a lot, and now I'll always wonder, when I see a page of results, what's missing.

[roddy]

It's a fair point. The current search set up indexes words. A chunk of Chinese text like 我已没有过去的笑颜 has no spaces or punctuation, so it's treated as a word - which means if you search for 笑颜 you won't get a match. I hadn't noticed this before.

There's an alternative search function which should work, but when I switched over to it and tried it it couldn't find any Chinese. I suspect that may be an encoding problem, and if I solve that maybe it'll work and we can use it. No promises or schedule though.

I hope you're not offended by this criticism

Man, running this site I've been called everything from 'facist' to 'the reincarnation of Mao' (meant as an insult, btw). Discontent with the search engine doesn't even come close to offensive

[skylee]

I tried to search the thread titled "漢武大帝" by keying in the "大帝" at the advanced search page and the result was "Sorry - no matches. Please try some different terms. ". Why? Can there be some improvement?

[klortho]

I'd just like to add that I think the search feature here is next to worthless, which is a major reason why, I think, I stopped coming to this site. In general, if I have a question, I'd really like to be able to search for the answer first, before posting it.

[stephanhodges]

Google tends to index this entire forum quite frequently. Have you tried their site specific search capabilities. Come to think of it, perhaps Roddy could just set up a "Google" search option directly too.

[roddy]

The English language search works about as well as you will ever get on a forum site, I think. It is very rare indeed that I can't find what I'm looking for by using the advanced search - and that does mean having to use the advanced functions, limiting by date / forum / titles or post, etc. It might take a few attempts, but it is an inexact science.

Chinese search is much more limited, as the search function works by indexing words, and words are defined as anything between spaces, and Chinese has no spaces. So effectively it is useless for finding words in amongst chunks of Chinese text - for example, skylee couldn't find 大帝, but searching for 漢武大帝 works fine.

As pointed out, you might want to make a Google site search your first option. Add site:chinese-forums.com to the start of your search term, and you'll have the not inconsiderable resources of Google helping you. For example, here, you get the desired topic right at the top.

If anyone knows of a forum running on Vbulletin that's successfully indexing both English and Chinese content, I'd be interested to know about it.

[gato]

Roddy, do you think this hack found vbulletin can fix the problem?

http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=78747&highlight=search+chinese

Advanced Multilingual Search [Translated Hack]

This hack was originally written by 007pig of vbulletin-chinese.com for users to preform search for Chinese text as well as conduct full text search directly on the post table. Due to member request on vbulletin.com, I have translated this hack and obtained 007pig's permission to re-release the translated version for vbulletin customers to use.

It's strange that phpbb doesn't have this problem with Chinese searches, though it's a software. I did a search for "中文" on Outofin‘ site and had no problem getting all posts with these two characters, space or no space.

Try it:

http://www.ting-shuo.com/search.php

[Quest]

Alternative: add a search by google field below the current search bar, write code to replace your_query with user entry, submit as form elements or as entire url.

wait for new vbulletin version

http://www.google.com/search?q=your_query+site%3Achinese-forums.com

[roddy]

Set Google's Site Search up today, but it was having issues finding what it should, so I've just added a note to the advanced search page with a link to an example site search.

[Quest]

What issues?