Why is playroom's search engine so bad?

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1. Nikola-Jovic ,

Hello, can Playroom have a different search engine? The current one is pretty bad, and i can give at least 2 examples to reproduce: Open http://qcsalon.net/en and press enter on search link, which will reveal an edit box to type your search term. In there, type uno and tab to the combo box and choose forum, then click the search button. NO result found for uno. Choose other search terms or be more general. BTW a small typo is that both n and o are capitalised. Anyways on to the next example. Now go back and type, belote. It brings up a bunch of unrelated topics, and here are the first 10 results where hash sign indicates my comment and not the actual topic title: 1. erreure en Rami

  1. Flaw in Cribbage Beta Scoring
  2. The draw of the belote tournament # finally we got something related.
  3. A new game-Bridge belote # and the last related result i was able to find was this one.
  4. Uno Tournament, Second Round Matches # so much of no topics with uno in the title :)
  5. Uno league, Final points standings of Conference 1. # no uno, right?
  6. points not scored in cribage.
  7. New Game: Mpourloto
  8. Uno league. points table for conference 1.
  9. New card game the Black laidy.\
  10. So, that's basically it, and i hope you could use a different search engine, even google's one would be great.

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2. spaceship,

didn't check it though, but i think from the information you provided I can safely say that its searching the contents of the forum.
I do agree with you, there should be better sorting of the results, the topics should be given main pryority and then the contents.

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3. Nikola-Jovic ,

Even if it just searches the context of the topic, it's still very unrelated

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4. spaceship,

Yeah so I agree this search engine is bad.
I mean the search engine just searches the word... Its not strong enough to identify pages considering how much related they are. What I am saying is not so important to understand, but i mean
like may be in some other tournament someone may speak about uno, Just giving an example: User is not good at uno but at this game he is excellent!
So its just searching for words I think... I agree with you completely. this engine should be improved.

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5. Nikola-Jovic ,

Yes i got what you mean though, still i've went through a lot of the results and the word belote wasn't mentioned anywhere, not to mention it not finding any result for uno, although that's another bug i think as i was able to identify it doesn't find results for any 3 characters string.

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6. spaceship,

Oh, In that case its even worse than I thought. lol

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7. Aminiel,

Sorry, but we are limited by the full text search capabilities of MySQL. That's quite bad, I know, but I have nothing better to suggest at present except using Google or another external search engine.

One of the restrictions is precisely that all words with 3 letters or less are totally ignored. That's why you don't find anything when searching "uno".

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8. Nikola-Jovic ,

But why not switch to google?
Edit: Never mind, i think i misunderstood you. Did you mean something like opening google and typing uno site:qcsalon.net
If yes, that brings another problem. Due to the way links on Playroom site work across different languages, we will get a lot of same results, just from different playroom server. I don't know if writing something like belote site:http://qcsalon.net/en works better, but i will try.

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Last edited by Nikola-Jovic , Apr 6 2017 19:33:42

9. Aminiel,

You can only specifiy a domain with the site: tag, unfortunately. But if you specifiy that you want only pages in english, then you shouldn't find french, spanish or italian pages.

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10. Nikola-Jovic ,

I'm not sure will that work, and i will try to be as clear as possible so you can understand what the issue is. Let's say i want to find topics about new games. If i search like this: New game site:qcsalon.net
i might get a topic called new game, and the link to it might be http://qcsalon.net/en/forum31/topic324 and even though this page is in English, i will get the same link just on for example French server, so it will look something like: http://qcsalon.net/fr/forum31/topic324. Now, if you look at those 2 links, they lead to the same topic, the only difference is the main menu of the site being in French on the second one so i don't think google would filter such things. The only solution i was able to find is to allow access to English forums only if the language is set to English, but i'm not sure how technically that is doable and how much work it involves.

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