Search feature not working

Search feature not working

in Forum and Website Bugs

Posted by: WierdScience.5062

WierdScience.5062

I have never found search on this site useful. For example:

To day my firewall prompted me about coherentui_host.exe. I’ve never heard of the file before so I came to the forums and did a search. I’ve attached a screen shot of the results.

There seems to be several issues. First, the search started after I typed the first character. It didn’t let me finish a complete word or phrase or press enter. Second, its results are unbelievable. I was able to type ‘c’ and search only found 1 result. Really?

A solution is simple. When you want to search these forums go to:

http://www.google.com/advanced_search

enter the search criteria in the provided boxes then scroll down to “site or domain:” and enter “forum-en.guildwars2.com”. Press enter.

or just go to http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=0 and type your query followed by “site:forum-en.guildwars2.com” (with out quotes of course).

Attachments:

Search feature not working

in Forum and Website Bugs

Posted by: smiley.1438

smiley.1438

“There is no spoon.”

Search feature not working

in Forum and Website Bugs

Posted by: shadow.6174

shadow.6174

“There is no spoon.”

ROFL. Just know the search is working, it’s just they pretending it’s broken :P

Search feature not working

in Forum and Website Bugs

Posted by: Blehh.5240

Blehh.5240

Are there any plans to fix the search feature? I am sure it is useful having so many threads repeating the same topics, because people can’t find the topic already started.

Search feature not working

in Forum and Website Bugs

Posted by: Charrbeque.8729

Charrbeque.8729

Are there any plans to fix the search feature? I am sure it is useful having so many threads repeating the same topics, because people can’t find the topic already started.

This thread was created “about a year ago” according to the first post. At this time I’m gonna say they have no intention of ever fixing the kitten thing.

I just had to find a thread so I could reference a post in it. I knew 1 word that was part of the thread title. When searching for a single word for anything you get NO results. If you search for the exact full name of a thread you’ll almost always get results. I finally found the thread I was looking for…….ON PAGE 76! If the kitten search feature actually worked it would have saved me a lot of time from having to find it page by kitten page.

Another issue is if you’re typing something into the search box and type too slow it will suddenly say “no results found”, deselect the search box and before you know it you’re going back 2 or 3 webpages in your browser. Try it out for yourself. Type a single letter and wait a few seconds. The stupid thing will automatically show the results even though you never hit the enter button or told it to search.

There’s something charming about rangers.

Search feature not working

in Forum and Website Bugs

Posted by: Simon C Tahlt.2934

Simon C Tahlt.2934

Looks like I asked my question in the wrong place… Probably because I couldn’t search properly to see if it’s been asked already.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/Why-doesn-t-the-search-work-on-these-forums/first#post4432695

Here’s the original post. This seems like a pretty basic feature of a forum:

I’ve tried searching the Guild Recruiting forums, and I constantly get no search results. I’ve even tried searching for words that I know are there in subjects and in posts… and still nothing. Is there some trick to making the search work? Or is it just a known problem with these forums?

It’s too bad, because in looking for a guild, I’d really like to search for simple things like the server I’m on, the style of the guild (PVE, PVX, etc.), the atmosphere of the guild (casual, expert, etc.), and so on.

Search feature not working

in Forum and Website Bugs

Posted by: smiley.1438

smiley.1438

Okay, thanks for the infraction, but this thread should be pinned since it seems noone at anet cares about this issue.
Please just remove the search box (protip: style=“display:none;”) and add a hint that we should better use the google site search instead. You can also add a google custom search box (https://developers.google.com/custom-search/) to save us the hassle typing site:http://forum-en.guildwars2.com/ into googles search.

Thanks.

Search feature not working

in Forum and Website Bugs

Posted by: llama.1736

llama.1736

I too was attempting to search for something in the forum today and became immediately extremely frustrated by typing “au” into the search box, the page reloading, and instantly deselecting the search box. Which btw if you mistype and hit backspace without thinking about it, the reload is NOT a new page, so you will go back to the page even before that. I agree you might as well just remove the thing. Google autoloads the search results its true but it doesn’t deselect the search box. I couldn’t even tell you if I can get results or not since I’m not even going to fight with it to find out.

Search feature not working

in Forum and Website Bugs

Posted by: shadow.6174

shadow.6174

I really wonder how devs can find threads around here, I wonder if they have some separated internal search engine or if they really search for something? Maybe they also use workarounds like we would use? Well, c’mon, it’s hard to understand how it hasn’t been fixed for around 2 years now. Either no one cared or no one has been able to find a fix.

I had tried to do some tests and it seems the issue lies on server side. The search box tried to retrieve results from a json type file but all it gets is only a “[]” no matter what terms were being searched (here is one example: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/search/forum/26?q=search%20broken).

Search feature not working

in Forum and Website Bugs

Posted by: Inculpatus cedo.9234

Inculpatus cedo.9234

You can read today’s Dev posts about the Search function either in GD or the Dev Tracker.

Good luck.

Search feature not working

in Forum and Website Bugs

Posted by: shadow.6174

shadow.6174

oh yeah? Could you please point which one you mean? I have checked Dev Tracker and I didn’t see anything about search function there. Also, what is GD? I’m not a native english speaker then sorry for this question.

Search feature not working

in Forum and Website Bugs

Posted by: Inculpatus cedo.9234

Inculpatus cedo.9234

General Discussion

At this time, 7th one down at 19:31 Gaile Gray in ‘Anet something or other’.

(edited by Inculpatus cedo.9234)

Search feature not working

in Forum and Website Bugs

Posted by: shadow.6174

shadow.6174

Search feature not working

in Forum and Website Bugs

Posted by: Inculpatus cedo.9234

Inculpatus cedo.9234

I believe so.

Search feature not working

in Forum and Website Bugs

Posted by: Graack.2103

Graack.2103

I am new to the forums, even though I have had my account for over two years. I recently found out that the search box always returns no results.

In my opinion, this makes the forums virtually useless. Why? Because there are a ton of pages of posts and I generally know what I want, such as ‘Nemesis’ or ‘Necromancer PVP’, etc and I am not interested in reading through hundreds of pages of posts to find it.

This is a critical feature of the games community-based support software. Please fix it.

Graack

Search feature not working

in Forum and Website Bugs

Posted by: DoctorOverlord.8620

DoctorOverlord.8620

This is a critical feature of the games community-based support software. Please fix it.

I cannot agree with you more. But it has been over 2 years, I doubt we will ever see it fixed.

ArenaNet really should just take down the Search function option rather than keeping that thing up as if it were something useful or even functional.

Removing it would insure that people know they need to use Google or Bing or standard search engines to find anything on these forums.

Check my GW2 Comic Dynamic Events http://goo.gl/JyB3J (Short Google Link to Fan Content Forum here)

Search feature not working

in Forum and Website Bugs

Posted by: Charrbeque.8729

Charrbeque.8729

You can read today’s Dev posts about the Search function either in GD or the Dev Tracker.

Good luck.

I believe you mean this exact post by Gaile Grey https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/anet-s-lack-of-transparency/first#post4480893

I’ll quote her whole post:

Also Gaile, can we please get the forum’s Search function fixed? It’s been broken for nearly 2 years. I know there’s been heaps of topics on this, but the sad irony is that they get lost in the forums and never acted upon.

Thanks for communicating.

Gaile Grey: I’m not discounting your other comments, and thanks for them. But I have to quote that bit ^ and respond: Yes, Yes, and Yes again! By all that Dwayna holds holy, I truly wish we could get a functional search engine!

It’s no secret that the forum software has some noticeable issues. We don’t have the ability to fix Search, just as we cannot address a few other things we’d like to tackle. I’m really sorry that it can be difficult to efficiently use the forum. Quite honestly, I’m absolutely delighted when I see someone was able to find links to old threads and provide them in current thread. In fact, I often find myself wondering "How long did it take that poor forum member to find those links? )

This is something we’re looking into, and there may be a couple of ways we can address it, even as we examine both short-term and long-term solutions.

So they flat out can’t fix the search feature on the forums. Perhaps they just need to completely rebuild the GW2 forums from scratch for it to work. That’s what it sounds like they need to do. At least they acknowledge the issue and are working on it.

There’s something charming about rangers.

Search feature not working

in Forum and Website Bugs

Posted by: shadow.6174

shadow.6174

Oh thanks Charrbeque, I was going to ask if someone could point me exactly what post was it because I skimmed over that thread and I couldn’t see it (ironically I couldn’t even try to search for it :P)

I truly wish we could get a functional search engine!

It’s no secret that the forum software has some noticeable issues. We don’t have the ability to fix Search, just as we cannot address a few other things we’d like to tackle. I’m really sorry that it can be difficult to efficiently use the forum.

So yeah, someone finally admits they aren’t able to fix it. To start, there is a simply thing that could be done: stop using AJAX and make a simpler search engine. The way the search works now was done based on SEO optimizations and stuff but it’s clearly broken. The file to where the search points to returns an error and an empty JSON file. Why using a SEO friendly URL as form’s destination? Use a normal URL without these fancy SEO stuff, that’s breaking the thing. Make a simple form that sends data to a simple URL like forum-en.guildwars2.com/search?q=SearchTerm instead a complex SEO “optimized” one like forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/search/SearchTerm. What’s happening is something like that. Turning off javascript and forcing a search by “normal” means (typing and hitting Enter) sends the data that to a page that returns like “Cannot find category named search”, what seems like a broken SEO “optimization”. Did I give some insight at least?

(edited by shadow.6174)

Search feature not working

in Forum and Website Bugs

Posted by: smiley.1438

smiley.1438

So yeah, someone finally admits they aren’t able to fix it. To start, there is a simply thing that could be done: stop using AJAX and make a simpler search engine. The way the search works now was done based on SEO optimizations and stuff but it’s clearly broken. The file to where the search points to returns an error and an empty JSON file. Why using a SEO friendly URL as form’s destination? Use a normal URL without these fancy SEO stuff, that’s breaking the thing. Make a simple form that sends data to a simple URL like forum-en.guildwars2.com/search?q=SearchTerm instead a complex SEO “optimized” one like forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/search/SearchTerm. What’s happening is something like that. Turning off javascript and forcing a search by “normal” means (typing and hitting Enter) sends the data that to a page that returns like “Cannot find category named search”, what seems like a broken SEO “optimization”. Did I give some insight at least?

There’s so much wrong in this post, lemme get this a bit straight:

There’s nothing wrong with an AJAX powered search – as long as it’s well implemented (see Google). The Fangamer Forum, however, isn’t – in so many ways (note the “proudly powered by wordpress” on the bottom of that page – i guess there’s a reason…).
A URL like domain.tld/search/searchterm doesn’t mean SEO optimization at all (the word “SEO optimization” is marketing babble anyway – there is no such thing, there’s only doing it right using web standards). The thing you meant is URL rewriting to not only create search engine friendly URLs but to also allow backend changes without breaking links - so for example it’d be possible to completely switch the forums software without breaking bookmarks or google (or any other search engine’s) search results.
The thing you mentioned what happens with Javascript disabled is actually the same page (or JSON result) which would be received via the AJAX search – there’s just a parameter missing, so you run into this error (also a clear sign that this forum’s software is… bad – a good one would also work flawless without Javascript).

Anyway, i’ve posted a GitHub link to a little greasemonkey script along with a stylesheet in reply to this thread last week which is a temporary fix for the search, using Google’s custom search. However, my post got deleted and i got infracted for it because the moderator thought i posted bad stuff, which clearly wasn’t the case. I hope that’s now sorted out (thanks to Gaile!), so i’ll post it again:

https://gist.github.com/codemasher/654f05a7cdf1c268d404

In order to use this script, you’ll need a google account where you have to create a custom search engine and an API key (links inluded in the script’s comments). For now i assume you know how to use greasemonkey etc. and you know a little Javascript to see that is no malicious stuff at all – i’ll write up some instructions when i got some time on my hands. Enjoy.

Attachments:

Search feature not working

in Forum and Website Bugs

Posted by: Inculpatus cedo.9234

Inculpatus cedo.9234

It’s not the first time they have admitted it’s broken. Lol. You guys must be new. Just a rehash of the conversations of a year and a half ago.

It’s easy enough to use Google or anything else; why belabor the issue? Just let it go.

Search feature not working

in Forum and Website Bugs

Posted by: shadow.6174

shadow.6174

@smiley: My bad, It was past 1am here when I wrote that post and some stuff I put weren’t clearly what I tried to say lol.

After I made that post I thought more about it and here is what I tried to say:

Currently the forum URLs were SEO optimized, it means the URLs were optimized to look more friendly to search engines and bookmarks (probably you know that). It uses a rewriting method as you described to achieve such thing.

Let me give an example to make it clear for those that don’t know it. Let’s take the URL for this thread as example: https:// forum-en.guildwars2.com /forum/support/forum/Search-feature-not-working/ (spaces inserted purposely to break link)
This is how we see the URL, but the real path could not be it. In fact, behind the scenes it could be something like https:// forum-en.guildwars2.com /forum?category=support&subcat=forum&thread=Search%20feature%20not%20working
This type of URL is unfriendly for search engines and they look scowling at it, then one of the reasons for the rewriting. No issues with it at all so far.

However, what happens is the search box has been like targeting an URL like https:// forum-en.guildwars2.com /forum/search/, and it’s possible that due some badly implemented optimization, error or whatever the rewriting thing seems to treat it like https:// forum-en.guildwars2.com /forum?category=search, causing then the “Cannot find category named search” error. In fact, this could be just part of the issue, there may be more involved.

Also, I didn’t mean that AJAX is a bad thing, I like it actually. Good sites also use them, like Gmail uses it since its beginning. What I meant is putting it aside for a while and then the issue could become clearer and apparent. AJAX method could mask things and make it hard to track down. Also a good point as you said, it also should work with javascript disabled. Lacking an alternative method for these cases also also isn’t a good implementation (people can have javascript disabled for countless reasons).

I hope I made my point clearer this time, hehe.

@Inculpatus: Not actually new here, I have been playing the game for around 1 year or so. But I admit I may not have read this thread completely or I missed some other thread where they said so. In fact, I started using forums months after I started playing. Also, yes it could be easy using Google, but Google can also bring junk, it can also bring irrelevant links and ad links. Wouldn’t it be better to have an internal search with no risk of irrelevant or not related links and without even needing to leave the current website? Then I said it still worth trying to have it. It’s like not bothering to fix a car by knowing you always can have a help of a winch truck :P

Search feature not working

in Forum and Website Bugs

Posted by: smiley.1438

smiley.1438

Currently the forum URLs were SEO optimized, it means the URLs were optimized to look more friendly to search engines and bookmarks (probably you know that). It uses a rewriting method as you described to achieve such thing.

Let me give an example to make it clear for those that don’t know it. Let’s take the URL for this thread as example: https:// forum-en.guildwars2.com /forum/support/forum/Search-feature-not-working/ (spaces inserted purposely to break link)
This is how we see the URL, but the real path could not be it. In fact, behind the scenes it could be something like https:// forum-en.guildwars2.com /forum?category=support&subcat=forum&thread=Search%20feature%20not%20working
This type of URL is unfriendly for search engines and they look scowling at it, then one of the reasons for the rewriting. No issues with it at all so far.

Seems like you still didn’t get the point about URL rewriting – you should really look into this to get the whole point of URLs like this and that this isn’t the problem at all

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rewrite_engine
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/misc/rewriteguide.html

Search feature not working

in Forum and Website Bugs

Posted by: shadow.6174

shadow.6174

Hehe I know about URL rewriting, I have used it a few times. It can be used for several purposes: to mask a real URL into another (making it search friendly or just hiding parameters or parts of it for whatever reason); creating a “permalink” then it won’t break in case the real URL changes or whatever happens to it; or redirecting old or “fake” URLs to a different place and maybe more.

Also, I was just supposing what could it be since I don’t have any access to what really is happening behind the scenes. It’s just the only think I could think for it to bring a “Cannot find category named search” message.

Again, I didn’t mean the issue was URL rewriting itself, it helps a lot at times, but maybe some part of it was badly implemented or have some error that may be possibly breaking the searching feature.

P.S.: Ok, I just noted I was redundant when I used “SEO optimized” lol

Search feature not working

in Forum and Website Bugs

Posted by: zaxil.2471

zaxil.2471

So I’m guessing from skimming these posts that search is not something I will see fixed anytime soon?

I would search for it, but you know, no search function…..

Search feature not working

in Forum and Website Bugs

Posted by: ltck.3659

ltck.3659

Again? It was working better before. >.>; Why does this keep breaking?

Also, the fact that it’s so quick to search FOR you (as opposed to hitting enter or search), is really annoying.

Also seems to be searching for “exact” phrases instead of with the “contains” function. Might consider searching related terms as well. Really not that difficult to implement, depending on the engine you’re using.

Chauvie – Mesmer | Guardian
http://www.anchauvies.net

Search feature not working

in Forum and Website Bugs

Posted by: shadow.6174

shadow.6174

Again? It was working better before. >.>; Why does this keep breaking?

When? I really can’t recall a single time I saw this thing working as it should. I haven’t been in game or forums since launch but I never have seen the search feature working. :S

Search feature not working

in Forum and Website Bugs

Posted by: Bear on the job.6273

Bear on the job.6273

Just wondering if this will ever be fixed.

Search feature not working

in Forum and Website Bugs

Posted by: Bear on the job.6273

Bear on the job.6273

2 years and the search function hasn’t worked once. At this point, it’s like a Duke Nukem joke.

Search feature not working

in Forum and Website Bugs

Posted by: shadow.6174

shadow.6174

Sadly enough. I wouldn’t hold my breath in hope it would be fixed very soon…

(edited by shadow.6174)

Search feature not working

in Forum and Website Bugs

Posted by: aspirine.6852

aspirine.6852

Why is this still not fixed, what kind of incompetence is this??

Search feature not working

in Forum and Website Bugs

Posted by: Xiohunter.2561

Xiohunter.2561

Over a year later and no working search function on these forums. Sasuga Arena Net.

Search feature not working

in Forum and Website Bugs

Posted by: Phil.3970

Phil.3970

Not working at all for me, either. Frustrating.

Search feature not working

in Forum and Website Bugs

Posted by: LeCreaux.3087

LeCreaux.3087

Sometimes it works for me one time, then every search after that is 0 results.

Search feature not working

in Forum and Website Bugs

Posted by: Tom Yzf.5872

Tom Yzf.5872

This should help if you can’t get the official search to work.

http://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/game/players/Forum-s-search-feature-doesn-t-work-A-tip

Search feature not working

in Forum and Website Bugs

Posted by: ketchup.2783

ketchup.2783

Yes, it takes a lot of money to have an OP Google search engine embedded into your site. So the above post is a practical work around.