Bitcoin Forum

It seems that the forum’s native search engine is returning very few results for search patters that should be flooded with results, and that normally work properly; at least for me.

i.e.
-   simple search for bitcoin -> returns 1 result (from 2010).
-   Advanced forum search for bitcoin (default settings) -> the same 1 result.
-   Advanced forum search for bitcoin (delimiting message age to last 1200 days) -> 1 single result from 2020.
-   Advanced forum search for merit (delimiting message age to last 300 days) -> 2 results.

I’ve tried other search terms such as usernames, getting 1 or 2 results at best.

I’ve also tried it on a few different browsers, cleaned cookies, and even rebooted the machine, but remain getting the said minimalist results. I don't recall this happening other than today (probably only in the past few hours).

Is this happening to everyone?

It seems that there is a problem with searching the forum already. I tried searching for Bitcoin and got one result from 2010 as well, as happened to you.

I tried searching for something else, such as halving, and got only two results from 2013 and 2017.

This is really strange. I also remember that several days ago I was searching for a topic in the local section and failed to get a result even though I tried many words that I remember were present in the topic.

on the advanced forum search, the search result increases when you click on "Search in topic subjects only" that can be seen on the "option". that being said, I remember getting a lot of results when using advanced forum search without clicking "Search in topic subjects only" but now I only get 1 or 2 results if I don't click the "Search in topic subjects only".

This issue has been around for a long time until now it wasn't been resolved.
If I remember correctly Admin said before that they intentionally reduced it because there is someone who spamming using it which affects the performance of the forum(Correct me if I'm wrong admin).

The last time the search function was down, the admin said something about the index being rebuilt. Maybe its the same this time and the function will work again in a day or two?

Thanks for reporting it, I think I fixed it now.

Thanks to those that have chipped-in to corroborate the unusual results, and to theymos for managing to resolve the issue with haste. I’ve tried it out and all seems good as far as I can tell.

Definitely... It's gotta be everyone. I tried searching and I had the same result, so I had to let it be,(not until I stumbled on this post).
....and that also happened coincidentally on the last revival day I guess..?
I don't think there's anyway some functions would go bad that people won't notice - especially for people that prioritize easy navigation over anything else...
I'm happy you got it fixed up - it saved our asses a couple more threads/inconveniences?...

Sandra 🧑‍🦰

Yeah, I noticed this error on the 4th of March, that’ll be Monday. I didn’t give it much attention but, a common forum search that could have result in a ton of related articles was bringing up just about 3 results. I didn’t directly sense that something was wrong, just felt it was a narrowing down of the results based on what was used in the search function but yeah, it’s much clearer now. It’s good you gave it the look I didn’t.
Didn’t get the information I needed then but, did source for it over the web.

Nice one giving this some urgent attending. It sure does make things easier and the forum clear of duplicates.

Unless I am missing something, the problem hasn't been solved yet.

I searched for the posts that have been made by myself and contain the word "bitcoin".
Before the fix, the forum search engine gave me only 1 post. Now, it's gives me 4 posts, but there should be still many more posts.

You seem to be right.  It doesn't work the way it should for me either! I only get some old results, not new posts.

This could be one of the reasons

https://talkimg.com/images/2024/03/08/yLsr1.png


Also, after the space where you are to fill what you are searching for, there is a box which gives you two options "match any words" and "Mark all words". When I selected match any words. It brought up more results  :o

I can confirm there is a problem, I am getting more results but they are all from 2010.
Generally, searches are inaccurate unless full text is included such as “Is something wrong with the forum’s native search function?”

Thank you for reporting on such an important topic. It needs to come to everyone's attention and it needs to be discussed and come to a proper conclusion. Hopefully the admins will see this through your report and it will fix the problem.

I also tried with this problem and didn't get any results as expected. It needs to be resolved. On the one hand it looks like you talked to the admin. It's ok if the admin deliberately reduces spamming. But I think it needs to be addressed. Many people are affected in many ways for this.
On the other hand, it seems that if there was a proper admin, it would have been solved. Since this didn't solve the problem I think the admin was not the right person. But I don't know for sure what the matter is.

True. Ninjastic is returning 1271 results for posts where you mention bitcoin, but the forum’s native search engine is bringing back only 4. There’s certainly something still going on for some reason. I’ve tried multiple combinations on the Advances Search Tab, but still the number of results returned is not right (searching by user: hosseinimr93; search for: bitcoin or other easy keywords).

have you guys tried it again? I think Theymos fixed it now. I just tried it again and it is now giving me a lot of search results(like I remember it in the past). I tried different keywords "bitcoin", "wallet", "merit", "Bitcoin ATH", and "crypto scam" and all of them gave me 5 pages worth of search results.

Yes, you will get many results. But I think that the search function still doesn't work as it should when you search for a term in the posts of a specific member.

For example, try these search parameters:

Search for:bitcoin       by user:hosseinimr93
   
This will produce only four search results from some very old posts.

And if we set a message age limit. For example: Between 0 and 99 days.

This will produce no results at all.

I can confirm this as well. I'm certain I have mentioned "Bitcoin" more than 12 times and at least once since 2021, but that's the total number I'm getting and the most recent date.

Considering the admin is already aware, we can give it a couple of hours or days to be fixed and use the alternative search options in the meantime.

It’s seemingly better that when I created the OP, but cases such as hosseinimr93’s depict a scenario that should render many more results than it actually does. I just retried it with the same results (4 resulting posts).

If you search for the keyword bitcoin by user acroman08 over the last 300 days, you only get 1 result, whilst manually searching for the term over your latest 20 posts renders quite a few more results.

Popular keywords not filtered by user render better results in appearance, but they may be returning a subset of the results. Could be a corrupt index (multiple) thing, but that’s just a guess on my behalf.
 

I don't use the search feature much on the forum itself, but I noticed adding "-anything" will yield more results, in your case "bitcoin -idk".

That's unrelated to the issue DdmrDdmr brought up.

Search has a number of quirks, and I'm not going to fix them all right now. In this case, your search didn't work as expected because words appearing in a large percentage of posts are not indexed within posts at all. Currently, there are 181 unindexed words, and "bitcoin" is one of them. So if you search for "bitcoin", it will not even look for posts containing "bitcoin" in their bodies, though it will search topic subjects, and it will highlight "bitcoin" in any posts found via subject-search. As another example, if you search for "bitcoin candy", it will search for messages with [both bitcoin AND candy in their subject] OR [candy in their body], even though it will highlight both "bitcoin" and "candy" in message-bodies in the results. (Furthermore, this will exceed the result limit, so you will actually only get an arbitrary subset of the possible results.)

Next time I reindex posts, probably it would be a good idea to not have any nouns in the list of unindexed words.

Have noticed this for a while now since last year but never really paid much attention to it cause I only ever use the search function to find people from years ago or backtrack on my old posts. I can definitely say there's something wrong as it doesn't show even the most remotest information related to what you're trying to look up, and instead puts up information that are either irrelevant to the search query, or total goofball results you wouldn't even be able to use.

Don't personally know how the devs will figure out a fix as well, as I've been told a week ago from my Notifications post in this same board there's not much we can do with an outdated system (simple machines forum) and putting the time and effort to dish out changes that require time and money could very well be considered a passion project from the sheer unfairness it will bring to those who will be tasked to work on it. So yeah, we might see changes, we might get the things we really want out of this forum but tech catches up pretty quickly and the older the forum gets, the more expensive and unfair coding these changes will be to the developers itself. Perhaps let's just thug this out until we get a revamp or something using a different forum system perhaps.

I think that's how it has always been since I joined the forum.
Most searches are few and most times not recent
That's why I opted to using search engine and just adding Bitcointalk at the end.