Thanks We are trying out new search functionality and interface, and appreciate your feedback.
Once in the Forums tab after searching for skymiles, does selecting "best match" give you helpful results?
ratback33 (Staff)
Salad Shooter
posted: Aug. 24, 2009 @ 4:21p
gfarry,
Thank you for your comments on the new search design. I see in your post that you are saying, "There is no ability to sort by date." There are several options for sorting within the new design.
Here is the run-down of how it works:
After entering in your search criteria and hitting "go", your results are displayed in the "all results" tab. You can filter your results to a specific section of the website by clicking a tab...or remove them entirely by clicking the check boxes to the left.
All Results tab: Shows all results (Cash Back, coupons & forums) based on the best, most relevant match for your search.
Cash Back Shopping tab: Shows only results located within the Cash Back Shopping section of our site. You can sort by best match, store, or Cash Back amount.
Coupons tab: Shows only results located within the Coupons section of our site. You can sort by best match, store, or Cash Back amount.
Forums tab: Shows only results located within the Forums section of our site. You can sort by date, best match, or rating.
I hope this helps you with our new search. Please give it another try and let us know what you think!
Has the new search interface been pulled? Whenever I search now I get the old UI. FWIW, I hated the new search results interface, it was so useless as to be laughable. What are the plans for it now? Is it being improved for future release or abandoned?
I'm sure it would be helpful if you are willing to share specifics about why it was useless to you. Please let us know what you were searching for, what you expected, and what you saw instead. If it works great for some and not for others, then we need to understand what specifically is failing in order to address it. Thanks
footn200 said: Still being tested as far as I know. I'm sure it would be helpful if you are willing to share specifics about why it was useless to you. Please let us know what you were searching for, what you expected, and what you saw instead.
- As a previous poster said, the shear volume of results returned was annoying. NONE of the searches I did ever returned less than 1,000 results. Even if I kept adding additional search terms and used the minus sign in front of multiple words to narrow things down, I could never get less than 930 results. Who has that kind of time? The purpose of a search to to yield targeted results, not to provide every possible tangential link imaginable.
-Relatedly, if I put a two-word search term in quotes, I would also get results that only included one word or the other, not both. If both words are not in the same link, they should be excluded from the results.
-I hated that so many of the results were merchant related. I know where the merchant list is and can access it easily from any page. I don't need them included in my search. I do understand that you get advertising dollars for them, so why not just have an option on the search results page to select the inclusion of merchant links once I've been provided with a succinct list of results? The existing/legacy search or "help/support" box provides results for forums only. Even the default in the "forum search" link is to search the hot deals and fatwallet forum only, with the option to expand the locations searched. It should stay that way.
-Unless I am mistaken, features available in the "forum search" link were missing (e.g., start/end date, title/body search, active/archived, OP's name). Not only would it be nice to have all of those features in once central location, it is all but essential when the search results are overly inclusive.
-The other problem was interative links. Meaning that if I looked for an old hot deals thread that someone posted about a sale at Bloomingdales, for example, I'd get say 30 different merchant links for Bloomingdales. All of these links are generated from the same main page for the merchant, I don't need every iteration of every link that stems from that merchant's main page... one link to the merchant's main page is more than sufficient.
-One thing about the new search interface that did I like was being able to sort by most relevant post since that made it a little easier to find a specific thread among the hundreds of results. This, however, was a useless feature if I was checking to make sure that a deal I wanted to post had not already been posted. Exactly how many of the hundreds of thread was I supposed to read through before I could accurately determine if the deal had already been posted?
-Likewise, not being able to sort by most recent post or (even most popular post, based on responses or votes) is frustrating. These become more essential features the selective the search results are.
-Using the check boxes on the left hand side to narrow down results was also frustrating. Everything under the sun is selected as the default. I guarantee that when most people do a search they are searching for a thread in a forum (and probably the bulk of these are in the free and hot deals forums). The returned results should be limited to the most frequently searched areas (however you figure this out I'll leave to your capable staff... maybe keep track of the links people select from their search results). Another annoyance with having everything pre-selected (when the vast majority of what you are searching for is focused), is that you ALWAYS has to deselect everything (how many different forums are there? nearly 20? and I have to deselect nearly all of them EVERY time I do a search?). Give us the the most focused results as the default and provide the option to select in less restrictive results like an obscure (sorry, just being honest) forum, merchants results, coupons and the like. Also, if I check a box, please allow the search to automatically update instead of making click yet another link to refresh the results (this only makes sense if the deault search starts out very restricted and you then select in additional search areas. Specifically, I would not want this feature if I had to wait for refresh results while un-selecting almost 20 pre-selected forums).
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Basically, instead of using the new search interface, I became frustrated and found myself going to the specific forum I thought the post would be in and using the "Title Search" feature, even if I had to search several forums that way.
Hope that is specific enough. I use the search feature so much I can't honestly say I remember exact search terms used under the new/beta system. I do know however, that the results were always horrendous and I couldn't wait for the membership outcry to result in either the old system being returned or the new system being fixed/receiving a major overhaul.
That's all that is coming to mind right now. If I think of anything else I'll let you know. I love how conscientious and concerned FW staff is and that you truly do listen to user opinion. Thanks.
Using your Bloomingdales example and the many merchant results, I want to point out the tabs at the top. If you click on the forum tab, you can see a filter for date, relevance, and rating. By default, it's set to date(I think). I also highlighted the left side filter, but I see you mentioned that. Try using the tabs and filters and see if you have better results.
MVP9596 said: Using your Bloomingdales example and the many merchant results, I want to point out the tabs at the top. If you click on the forum tab, you can see a filter for date, relevance, and rating. By default, it's set to date(I think). I also highlighted the left side filter, but I see you mentioned that. Try using the tabs and filters and see if you have better results.
Thank you. I did see the features that you pointed out and I did use them. I think, however, that the forum view/tab should be the default to save the extra clicks when doing multiple searches. I also think that all of the forums should not be included in the default search, rather, we should be given the option to include additional forums (as well as the merchant and coupon results) once we receive the initial succinct search results. It may not sound like much, but having to repeatedly click over to the forum tab when I wanted to search the forums in the first place is a pain, especially when I also have keep adding search terms, using + and - signs and quotations around various words, and deselecting forums and tabs in an effort to to get a useable result. It all adds up to frustration fairly quickly, especially if you use the search feature frequently. I also think that the default setting should be to sort by relevance, for obvious reasons, but would prefer that only relevant search results be returned in the first place (see my point about trying to determine if something has already been posted).
I'm sorry if I'm not explaining myself very clearly here. Maybe someone else with similar concerns will chime in and do a better job.
I just did some searches in the new interface. The first one returned 190 results and the second (completely different) returned 21 results. I was stunned, then very very happy. Great job guys. Thank you.
Is there any way to add the option of searching the archives to this interface?
larrymoencurly said: It's a lot better if you just go to Google and use it to search the site.
LOL. I know exactly what you mean. I get so frustrated with the search engine on FW I do sometimes go to google search. But I'm glad that the FW care about improving their search engine and want our feedback to help them do so. And if things get straightened out it will be a lot more convenient to not have to keep opening another window/tab to search google.
I forgot to mention in my last post that those much smaller/refined search results were obtained the first time out (no need for additional refinement of the search term or 40 clicks/endless fine tuning to get less than 997 results). Also neglected to mention that I used the "help/support" search box if that matters.
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