How do you search Geekzone?

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clinty

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#148566 23-Jun-2014 16:48

I'm interested in how other users search Geekzone to retrieve relevant threads, or look up things they know they've seen on Geekzone, but just can't remember when :)

What google-fu do you use?

Do you use the custom search on geekzone or search directly from Google (or Bing or "insert search engine of choice" )

Should there be a sticky on the best search variables (site: etc) to use to accomplish specific outcomes ( arrange results by latest thread, etc)

Clint

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Mad Scientist
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#1072787 23-Jun-2014 16:51

I found that the search bar gives you "most relevant" order of results ... sometimes that means 10 year old posts/threads come first and what I am after is bumped out of view

very annoying

jnimmo

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#1072789 23-Jun-2014 16:54

Yep the only thing that bugs me about GZ, the impossible search. It wouldn't matter if it did it by relevance if only it could show the date of the post without clicking into it - so I just use 'site:geekzone.co.nz best isp' and then can see the date each was posted on. Maybe even filter it by results in the last year only.

clinty

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#1072792 23-Jun-2014 16:58

jnimmo: Yep the only thing that bugs me about GZ, the impossible search. It wouldn't matter if it did it by relevance if only it could show the date of the post without clicking into it - so I just use 'site:geekzone.co.nz best isp' and then can see the date each was posted on. Maybe even filter it by results in the last year only.

Not totally conversant on Google Search, but I assume this is part of the algorithm ie it doesn't matter when it was published as long as Google thinks it is the most relevant to your search :) Is there something in google search that would allow this functionality?

jnimmo

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#1072840 23-Jun-2014 18:07

Google Custom Search does let you add a 'sort by' relevance /date button for the user, and it seems to work for Geekzone in my testing. So would be nice if that was added to GZ one day.
Alternatively you can set a bias, i.e you could put a strong date bias on to prefer recent results. But that may not always be what people want..

Unfortunately I don't think it is possible to influence either of the above on public Google.com searches though, only restrict the date range

timmmay

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#1072874 23-Jun-2014 19:38

Just search google.co.nz with the term +site:geekzone.co.nz . There are no doubt ways to narrow down things like date when you do a google search... google "google search tips".

freitasm

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#1072896 23-Jun-2014 20:12

If you use Google search and find a way to narrow down or sort by date, do it - I haven't found a good way. We do have the appropriate tags in every page with date/time stampts as required by Google.

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timmmay

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#1072900 23-Jun-2014 20:22

Advanced search has a restrict by date field. That probably doesn't help here on GZ though.

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jnimmo

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#1072951 23-Jun-2014 21:52

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1683671/GSE.html Here is an example where you can search GZ sorted by date

I think GZ needs a display date rich snippet/pagemap attribute in order to get it showing a date on Google results (mucking around with those 'by', last updated lines)

This is all the Javascript required to add the sort by option
orderByOptions['keys'] = [{label: 'Date', key: 'date'} , {label: 'Relevance', key: ''}];
customSearchOptions['enableOrderBy'] = true;

freitasm

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#1072962 23-Jun-2014 22:23

There's a datemap attribute in all pages.

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Ragnor

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#1073619 24-Jun-2014 18:11

The google search is ok but a forum specific search (say: Keywords, Author and Date Rate as inputs) returning a list of posts by relevance would be nice.

Wouldn't want to write it in classic asp or use SQL server full text search, hmm.... index the post fields from the DB with Lucene.NET then a nice MVC page/app for the front end....

RunningMan

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#1078728 2-Jul-2014 16:03

Is this new?

Behodar

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#1078729 2-Jul-2014 16:03

RunningMan: Is this new?

Was just about to ask that! So it's not some dodgy plugin that's managed to make it into my browser, at least :)

freitasm

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#1078730 2-Jul-2014 16:03

Just testing things.

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RunningMan

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#1078731 2-Jul-2014 16:04

Behodar: So it's not some dodgy plugin that's managed to make it into my browser, at least :)

That was my first thought ;-)

freitasm

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#1078741 2-Jul-2014 16:11

Waiting a full day for crawler to index site, but not happy with results so far - Google search pages are much more targeted.

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