New Search Function by BoardTracker

[Frank Hagan]

BoardTracker is a search engine specifically for forums, and they have finished indexing our site.  The search box is in the upper right, below our advertising banners.  When you enter a phrase in the search box and click "Search", a new window opens with the results from BoardTracker.  Its much more complete than the built-in search function for the forums.

Try it, and let me know what you think!

[waynemunro]

Hey Frank, looks quite nice. I work for a company which does site search, so I understand how difficult this sort of thing can be to do right. The results appear to be relevant, which is good.. were I to put on my critical hat I guess I could note a few things that strike me about it.

- the categories selection box seems to be a bit of a waste of time for this site, which is not a reflection of the search, but that the niche of this site is already so focussed that just about every result will be in one category (if they are categorized at all). I assume this is a reflection of this being just a site restrict on a much wider search.

- the google ads seem well placed, they are not too invasive - I hope you are getting a cut ?

- I changed the 'In:' setting to 'my threads' and it then required login to boardtracker - I wasn't too sure what was happening there, I guess I was being a bit optimistic and was hoping that it would somehow have been passed by messing-about id and would be able to restrict the result set to the threads that I have contributed too.

- it is nice that it lists the number of views and replies in each entry - may be interesting to be able to order by that ? though I guess you should get that effect a little with the relevancy as a thread with many entries should have more matches to the search word (assuming it comes up periodically)

Sorry if I sound like I am being picky - you did ask

It does seem better than the old one though - thanks.

Wayne

[Frank Hagan]

Thanks, Wayne.  I like the comments.

BoardTracker is someone else's product, and their intent is to provide a place to get relevent searches of forums ... Google and the rest don't do too well tracking the PHP URLs for some reason.  At first, I had "radio button" options for searching all of Boardtracker, or just messing-about.com, but so far we're the only boat building site so you get a lot of false links with a search term like "epoxy".  But you can initiate the search from here, then remove the "messing-about.com" from the "Domain:" box on BoardTracker and see the rest of the results.  If some of the other boat building boards sign up, I'll re-institute the option to search all or just this site.

We do have three categories we're indexed in ... boat building, wood working and web hosting.  But most people here are going to be interested in boat building and maintenance.  

When you go to the results page, the Google ads are on BoardTracker's site, so they get whatever revenue they provide, and that's how they are supporting themselves.  If the feature is convenient enough for our users, that's a fair tradeoff.  The "Thread Tools", RSS feed, etc. all come from that site.  It could be a convenient thing if you are looking for any mention of "epoxy prices" in a number of forums, and then you get the index by RSS feed when they are found by BoardTracker.  

It is funny that you can't filter the results further.  I tried using your username as a search term, but it only returns posts where your website is mentioned.  They have an "Ignore this poster" option, but they should have a way to search for all posts by a user, for instance.