Curious what the problem with the current search engine is? Agree that it’s important to be able to find forum posts via Google, which is currently an EA Forum specific issue, but improvements to the search likely also affect LessWrong, so I am curious in getting more detail on that.
Posts are not listed in order of relevance. You need to know exact words from the post you’re searching for in order to find it—preferably exact words from the title.
For example, if I wanted to find your post from four days ago on long term future grants and typed in “grants”, your post wouldn’t appear, because your post uses the word “grant” in the title instead.
For example, if I wanted to find your post from four days ago on long term future grants and typed in “grants”, your post wouldn’t appear, because your post uses the word “grant” in the title instead.
FYI, this was a very helpful concrete example.
On reflection your reasoning is false though—it’s not because the post uses the word ‘grant’. If I search ‘grant’ I get almost identical results, certainly the first 6 are the same. If I search ‘ltf grants’ I get the right thing even though neither ‘ltf’ or ‘grants’ is in the title. I also think that it’s not like there aren’t a lot of other posts you could be searching for with the word ‘grant’ - it isn’t just random other posts, there are *many* posts withing ~2x karma that have that word in the title.
Still, I share a vague sense that something about search is not quite right, though I can’t put my finger on it.
(Edit: This was written before Khorton edited a concrete example into their comment)
Interesting. I haven’t had many issues with the search. I mostly just wanted it to have more options that I can tweak (like restricting it to a specific time period and author). If you know of any site (that isn’t a major search engine provider) that has search that does better here, I would be curious to look into what technology they use (we use Algolia, which seems to be one of the most popular search providers out there, and people seem to generally be happy with it). It might also be an issue of configuration.
Curious what the problem with the current search engine is? Agree that it’s important to be able to find forum posts via Google, which is currently an EA Forum specific issue, but improvements to the search likely also affect LessWrong, so I am curious in getting more detail on that.
Posts are not listed in order of relevance. You need to know exact words from the post you’re searching for in order to find it—preferably exact words from the title.
For example, if I wanted to find your post from four days ago on long term future grants and typed in “grants”, your post wouldn’t appear, because your post uses the word “grant” in the title instead.
FYI, this was a very helpful concrete example.
On reflection your reasoning is false though—it’s not because the post uses the word ‘grant’. If I search ‘grant’ I get almost identical results, certainly the first 6 are the same. If I search ‘ltf grants’ I get the right thing even though neither ‘ltf’ or ‘grants’ is in the title. I also think that it’s not like there aren’t a lot of other posts you could be searching for with the word ‘grant’ - it isn’t just random other posts, there are *many* posts withing ~2x karma that have that word in the title.
Still, I share a vague sense that something about search is not quite right, though I can’t put my finger on it.
(Edit: This was written before Khorton edited a concrete example into their comment)
Interesting. I haven’t had many issues with the search. I mostly just wanted it to have more options that I can tweak (like restricting it to a specific time period and author). If you know of any site (that isn’t a major search engine provider) that has search that does better here, I would be curious to look into what technology they use (we use Algolia, which seems to be one of the most popular search providers out there, and people seem to generally be happy with it). It might also be an issue of configuration.