Horribly broken forum search returns same page over and over again

[olhed]

What is with the search in this forum?
Searching returns a few replies over and over again.
For some reason they have slightly different URL:s which might explain the problem, but all of them go to the same thread, or a copy of the same thread.

Search get quite impossible to use properly with all these "ghost results".

try for example searching for "CEikEdwin problem" and I think you'll understand what I mean...

You must try find a way to identify these pages, and weed them out of the search...

[symbianyucca]

maybe you could try defining the search string better, and use '+' sign to identify that it is AND not OR for the search strings.

[olhed]

Thats not the problem...

The problem is it returns the same page over and over again.

Refining it doesn't change it one bit, since all the results are identical, they still are listed.

Please, just try "CEikEdwin problem" (or "CEikEdwin + problem" if you want) and check the results...

Open the 20 results on the first page and notice most of them go to the same thread...

[olhed]

The point is, the search should only return ONE result per thread with the word in it.
Not thirty different links to the same thread.

Doing that makes the search useless, I want to do general searches and get a list of all threads with this word in it, as in this example, all references to CEikEdwin, but if the lists is 30 times longer then it should, it gets quite hard to get any overview...

And its very easy to miss the one unique link to an interesting thread in the flood of duplicates.

[Nokia Ron]

What is with the search in this forum?
Searching returns a few replies over and over again.
For some reason they have slightly different URL:s which might explain the problem, but all of them go to the same thread, or a copy of the same thread.

Search get quite impossible to use properly with all these "ghost results".

try for example searching for "CEikEdwin problem" and I think you'll understand what I mean...

You must try find a way to identify these pages, and weed them out of the search...

The current search engine for Forum Nokia is the google search engine. I'm not sure what problems you are having but if you can write to me with exactly how you are doing the search (are you using advanced search?) we would like to improve your satisfaction.

Ron

[olhed]

Thank you for the quick reply.

I'm not sure how much more information you need, I though I already was quite specific.
But I'll try describe it again, step by step.

1. Search box in the top right corner. no advanced, nothing special, just the plain search box.
2. Enter "CEikEdwin problem", and pressing "Search"
3. Open the 20 first results on the first result page.
4. notice that even though it looks like 20 results, its in fact only 4 unique threads.

And I get about the same "signal to noice" ratio no matter what I try to search for, making it very hard to spot the actual results.

[Nokia Ron]

The google search engine is sometimes too smart. It is giving a response for each message in a thread not just a thread.

You can narrow it down using "CEikEdwin problem" but again it gives posts not threads.

I'll see if this can be fine tuned, but this is what was highly requested for years.

Ron

[olhed]

I think you are mistaken.

That was also my first reaction, but if you look at it closer you will see you get the same result a lot more times then there is posts in the thread.
I think there is also more results then there is references to the words on each page, but I guess I need to double check that too be sure...

Reason you get fewer results with '"CEikEdwin problem"' is ofcourse because that matches fewer pages.

I think a hint to the reason for the problem is in the URL:s to the threads... Note that they are different, even though they link to the same page.
Maybe its possible to reach the same page through many different links, and this makes the googlebot confused thinking the same page is two different pages.

For a short thread, the sensible behavior is of course to return one result per unique thread. (ofcourse it should still _search_ in all of the thread)
Most threads on this forum is short.
However, for long threads, I do agree it does make sense to return one result per post.
BUT! If you are to return one result per post, you must make sure it also links directly to that post, and not to the thread, for it to be useful.

I think its great that you upgraded the search engine on this forum, but you really have to make sure its sensibly configured, and the site is set up in a way that it can use efficiently, because its quite easy to see now that its not...

[olhed]

Another quite convincing hint that the problem is NOT the google search, but your configuration is this:

Try to do a search on google.com for "CEikEdwin problem site:http://discussion.forum.nokia.com/forum/" and you get better results...

Still the same threads, but this time only one result per thread.

[Nokia Ron]

You are correct, I will report this. thanks for following through I really do appreciate this.

Ron