Search problem

[Paul Barasi]

Many thanks, Mark: the search is much improved.

The biggest problem with this site is its success.

Some may feel we have a lot of lurkers and, sure, there are a few guests on here too, but actually the membership is very active in both reading and posting. The amount of material has mushroomed and can be expected to grow at an increasing rate, and interaction has speeded up. The result is a vast amount of expanding material on one site, some of which is unique and much of it of value. Knowing what's here and being able to access it is therefore becoming harder, as is finding posts that can be remembered from previous visits and personally managing what seems of most interest and quality to each of us (indeed, it would be a handy facility if members could have Twitter-like stars to list their favourites, stored in their profile). Organising this collection of material (which perhaps could be aided by some new internal links device) and the search will become increasingly important and probably become greater challenges.

[Mark Thomas]

Thanks for the thumbs up, Paul.

There's no documentation about wildcards either, Mike. As I say, I have asked in the software support forum for more details of the standard parameters used by Search, but so far have received a not very helpful reply.

[JimL]

I second Paul's evaluation.  Sometimes when looking up an unsung composer I pump the name into a search engine and fairly often one of the links provided is to one of our posts.  I'm fairly sure that as radio broadcasts from the world over introduce some of these names to the public we'll get a boost in visits and membership.

[MikeW]

Another option for seeking out accented composers is to use an external search e.g. martinu site:unsungcomposers.com. That will return all the forms.

There are so many sites I do this on, irrespective of character-set issues, and get much better results than the native search.

[Mark Thomas]

The modification which I added this morning, giving a drop down menu next to the search box specifying where to search, also has the option to make a Google search of UC. I've enabled it now, so as well as using UC's native (and evidently flakey) search facility, you also now have the option of searching the site using Google. Thanks for the prompt, Mike.

The software forum's denizens are now proving keen to help on the question of how UC's search treats accented characters and wildcards but I'm afraid that their advice threatens to stray into rather deeper water than I am comfortable with. I was hoping for a simple statement on how UC's search function treats works but so far, despite their best efforts, the answer seems to be "it depends".

[Amphissa]

You can truncate search terms by using the asterick (*). In other words, if you search with Martin* you will receive instances of Martin, Martinon, Martinu, etc. Unfortunately, it STILL does not pick up my own post of Martinu.

I also discovered that where you search does make a difference. If you search the entire Downloads forum using This Board for Noskowski, you will get much different results than if you search in the Polish folder for Noskowski.

I tried using the Google Search option for Martinu. That was .... interesting. But fruitless.

A very odd situation.

[Sydney Grew]

. . . A recent item in Downloads, Sydney Grew said "let us have at least one item from Bohuslav Martinů." Which seemed odd, since I had posted a Martinu item just last month for download. . . .

Tangentially (since it doesn't address the search problem) I have now altered the text to "at least one more item . . ."

[MikeW]

I did some test searches for Amphissa's March 3 2012 post.

Using a different keyword, e.g. Julietta or Goncalves, it can be found with the site search, but none locates them with Google. My hypothesis is that Google hasn't been able to crawl that topic, possibly due to a connection failure (which I find quite very frequent on this site). It isn't a side-effect of the Martinu/Martinů issue.

[Amphissa]

I think Google may not be able to search the Downloads forum because it is limited to registered members only -- it's behind a login.

[Mark Thomas]

Yes, I hope that's right!