Improve Search functionality on DevForum

https://devforum.roblox.com/t/is-g-shared-really-that-bad/754740/

I’m really confused as to why this didn’t show up as the first result but instead completely irrelevant Topics?

Google returns much more accurate results

I don’t get it, why is the search showing Topics from Announcements first when they are completely unrelated

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This is likely because the built-in Discourse search is somewhat naive and ignores certain characters.

We’re aware of this issue and it’s on the near-term roadmap to improve.

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I’ve gotten this too. Whenever I search anything up the top announcements come up, then my query.

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It’s annoying that unrelated announcements show up first then you have to scroll down. Workaround is to “search” for only this category in topic

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I don’t think I can agree with your statement

Can you elaborate?

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the search with the keyword “Exploit” but it returned irrelevant results if you look at the screenshot you’ll see many topics from Announcement

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Right, so just confirming, it’s the same issue I acknowledged here? Or is there anything you disagree with in this post?

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I believe the issue here is that the search feature doesn’t distinguish between whether the keyword appears in the topic or in a reply. I think that adding a toggle to only show topics where the keyword is in the topic itself would help resolve this.

Already exists, write in:first in your search query or select it from the dropdown:

Oh, ok. Thanks for pointing this out, it actually resolves a lot of the issues with search.

Actually, its because Discourse’s search functionality isn’t based on the title, but on a topic or replies content.

For example, when you search up “exploit”…


You see the words that are bolded? That’s the word you searched for, which isn’t in the post’s title, but in a topic’s content or a reply’s content.


TL;DR

The search function is working the way its supposed to.

Its just that certain replies to topics can be completely unrelated to the original post, thus causing unrelated results.

Hence the feature request to “improve search functionality on DevForum”. Your reply seems to go into a circle and end up at the premise of this thread.

The point is when you search “_G” Discourse shows you all posts that contain the letter “g” in some shape or form. There are other situations where Discourse native search breaks down as well.

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