Once I looked for the Black Lives Matter thread, and the search button thing did not find it because I did not run the words together as BlackLivesMatter.
When I just now searched for the Startup Ideas thread, I knew the deal, but it reminds me:
Shouldn’t the search function really be whitespace-insentitive?
Er what? So searching for “over look” and “overlook” should result in the same output? This does not make any sense.
I’m not sure if I am supposed to argue about it.
How does this game work?
I already explained why it does make sense.
In your own example, why would anybody search for one of those strings but not want to see instances of the other? Do they mean different things?
What if one or two more quick search adjuster buttons were added?
What if another one was added next to search this topic that was “just search topic titles” or “just search user posts”? Being able to separate search results between posts and topics could possibly fix the problem @smulder is having.
I am not aware of any search engine that operates in the manner you are
describing.
Google’s fuzzy search suggests separating words sometimes
Press the options link depicted in your screenshot to get detailed search
options. “Search for topics” is already the default in all cases.
(Though technically the search drop down searches for users and categories
as well…)
I had presumed that based on my use of the search bar. However that still doesn’t address @smulder’s issue, there is no way just to search for topics as far as I can tell and that’s why I think adding another limiter could be helpful for anyone just looking for topic results, not posts or users.
EDIT- On second thought maybe that still doesn’t address the issue… there just seems to be something clunky about the search feature on the BBs when used outside of specific topics where it basically acts as an internal page search, something which can already be accomplished with [cmd → f] / [cntrl → f ].
At one point, I was able to force Google into that behavior by using hyphens: “no-one” would find both “no one” and “noone.”
But that went away (to my disappointment; it was a clever bit of Google-fu).
But that kind of straight-up matching? Yeah, that sounds all kinds of computationally intensive. A person might be able to see at a glance where a hashtag “should” be separated into words, but a computer would have to check pretty much every valid substring, which would scale as about a square of the word-length.
Yes, feel free to also compare the market cap of Discourse and Google.
… And?
You said:
And I offered an example of this working in the way @smulder was expecting.
My advice to others is for more advanced searching requirements, just use Google with site:bbs.boingboing.net as a search parameter.
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