How to search and find?
Hi
As I'm kind of new to the CO workflow and features I often reply on reading forums, watch instructional videos and guides on the web.
But when it comes to searching these forums, it seems that Phaseone have tweaked the search possibilities so more or less what ever you search for you end up with the most important words beeing ignored because they are too common or short.
Whats the point of having a forum when you cant search for commons words or your camera model?
Should I be forced to use google to find what I need on these forums or is there some magic trick to fool the restrictive settings?
As I'm kind of new to the CO workflow and features I often reply on reading forums, watch instructional videos and guides on the web.
But when it comes to searching these forums, it seems that Phaseone have tweaked the search possibilities so more or less what ever you search for you end up with the most important words beeing ignored because they are too common or short.
Whats the point of having a forum when you cant search for commons words or your camera model?
Should I be forced to use google to find what I need on these forums or is there some magic trick to fool the restrictive settings?
0
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I doubt that the search rules are specifically set by the Phase Crew - more likely they are just some default settings of the software tool.
While it is true that Phase provide this forum it is intended to be a User to User resource not a fully curated service for searching as if it was a knowledge base resource.
So I guess it is up to us users to add tags to our posts - and indeed coordinate what those tags should be and how they might be used.
Hmm.
My experience in the past working with such text based data was not encouraging.
We had a large technical text based data file of Technical Support problems that contained full descriptions of problems, diagnostic work and, eventually, solutions. So really very like this sort of forum form a search point of view.
Find relevant records for a search, even when we knew they existed, seemed difficult. So I did some analysis of the words in the database.
Just English language in out case but I would guess the results would have been similar in effect an most languages.
From memory the text contained about 8000 different "words", including spelling differences. About 7000 once typos were allowed for,
Some obvious and "Useful" common words that we would typically search for turned out to be SO common in the text that there was no use at all in searching for them. 50% of the "posts" would have those words.
3 letter words were just noise or the strings also existed as parts of other words. A complete waste of time searching text for them BUT, with some usage "rules" applied they could be quite useful as technical keywords - or perhaps TAGS in the context of user forum software. Better still if the tag was not a single tag but several or was a phrase ... "Canon 1DX" or "Nikon D700" for example. But for a good effect they needed to be managed and so table driven not created "on the fly".
In the end, it became clear that there were only about 500 words at best (more like 200 in reality) that were likely to be commonly used AND useful in the context of a typical search that might return something of interest rather than hundreds of posts that would take hours to read through. There was no obvious way at that time (pre-internet and a long time before anything like google started to appear) to do the complete analysis that would have been required to improve what was available for the search without having much more rigid control of the data being stored. That was something that was not at all likely at the time and in any case was unlikely to give enough return on the effort required to make it worth doing.
Things may be different now given the work that Google and others have done optimising search term interpretation and matching.
Have you considered trying a Google search based in specifying the forum name in the search to be undertaken?
If that doesn't work probably nothing will ...
Grant0 -
Yeah it do work by searching google. But someone should be forced to go somewhere else to search and find the answers that's here to begin with. A bit tedious thats all.
😊0 -
I'd guess it's a limitation of the phpBB forum engine. 0 -
[quote="atenolol" wrote:
Yeah it do work by searching google. But someone should be forced to go somewhere else to search and find the answers that's here to begin with. A bit tedious thats all.
😊
True enough although it should be possible to set up and save a dedicated search portal via Google, or so I believe.
It is not something I have spent time considering.
Yes it would be nice to have a great search as part of the forum but I'm not sure that there would be enough value in the cost of managing it for effective results.
I find I can usually, but not always, discover what I am looking for quite quickly. It depends on how well I remembered what might be there!
Google's access (and that of the other search engines) to an indexed version of most forum sites is probably faster than an individual site could create and support cost effectively for itself. Which, if that is how the economics work, might be why the forum software developers never seem to be especially concerned about providing their own super search facilities.
That could be done but would require the customer to do some management of the system.
For example the majority of 1, 2 and 3 character "words" are just noise in a search. However some strings are not when used in the context of the specific forum. D3, 1DX for examples.
Do one can build an exceptions table that contains terms that should NOT be excluded from the general exclusion. Better still the "words" might be flagged as important Key words - although there would be work required in many situations to assess the effect of such a decision.
If people are prepared to put in more time and effort the search can be made more effective by introducing other rules about the context of use of the string that you wish to select. So "Nikon D3" might be good and useful whereas Nikon alone would return too many results for your search about a D3 and D3 would find nothing because it is only 2 characters.
Smarter still, "D3" with the word "Nikon" "within 3 words" (before or after possibly?) could be even more useful and specific. Maybe.
The big search engines already set out to do that analysis of "natural language" automatically in the background. To attempt to do the same thing locally when the results are already just a tiny fraction of a second away on the internet (with luck) in a Google or Bing, et al., server maybe has little appeal considering the cost and effort involved.
So while I fully agree that perfected searches are desirable I think most of humanity will always be happiest using someone elses work to refine and deliver the result - which is probably why Google get away with what they do and generate a lot of turnover.
Just my toughts, for what they are worth.
Grant0 -
[quote="John Doe" wrote:
I'd guess it's a limitation of the phpBB forum engine.
...Is the correct answer.0
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