I agree about chronological order – would be nice.
The trouble with defaulting to date order is that if you search for “Le Touquet Burger Place” and sort the results by date you’ll get the most recent thread which uses the word “burger” or worse still “place” first. There might be hundreds of threads before you get to one which also mentions Le Touquet. You may then say well give us anything that mentions all those terms, in date order, which is ok but then you have to search precisely and none of the smartness around relevance can come into play, e.g. placing more emphasis on thread titles, or more frequent occurrence of the words you’re searching for (so you get a thread that is about burgers in Le Touquet, rather than a thread which is about engine failure where someone somewhere says “I was talking about this with a friend on a recent trip to Le Touquet” and right near the end just adds a throwaway “gosh all this discussion makes me want a burger”), or the closeness of the search terms, or synonyms, or a load of other “relevance” factors.
I’m not say it’s perfect, but I am saying it’s not as simple as “just give us the results in date order”.
David, I take your point, but I am just saying I find search here largely useless. It may be very clever but I can never find what I want – I don’t think I am alone.
In my view it should provide all searched for terms in date order. So if I search for burger place le touquet, I want a chronological lost of all threads that use all those terms.
Le Touquet AND burger could return all the results that have both, ordered in chronological order.
You probably keep log of a search history. Bar you or Peter, how many searches use expressions more sophisticated than the basic one (or the AND one)?
Maybe queries of very similar / same priority result could be displayed on chronological order?
I think a solution that would make everyone happy would be to click on the “time” column to get the resultant ordered by that
From here
I second that!
As I’ve described in the past, I think there are subtle but important issues with sorting by date.
As an experiment I’ve now changed it to give results by date, most recent first. Ironically, having made the change, now when I search on search order in order to find the post I wanted to link to above, it doesn’t come up in the first five pages of results. It would presumably come up eventually but I stopped looking after five. Before the change from ordering by relevance it came up first, because it was the most relevant because of lots of mentions of those words in the thread.
So we’ll see how it goes, but for now, they’re ordered by date.
Has anyone tried the new search?
Peter wrote:
Has anyone tried the new search?
Not much but a few searches. If sorting by the user is not an option, I find sort by date better as relevance is quite difficult when you search e.g. for “camera”.
By the way, I mostly search euroga in google, e.g.:
That gives relatively good results and google craws euroga very often, so even threads from an hour ago can be found.
I have been testing the date-based search and – for my usage at least – it is much worse than the previous relevance based search. The latter applied various weighting factors in the algorithm e.g. the subject name having a greater weight than the body.
Given the tendency on EuroGA to have thread titles which are descriptive of the discussion (something all the other forums don’t particularly bother with, and I often edit the thread titles to improve relevance where required) this yields vastly better search results than a purely date based search.
I think it would be better to revert to the previous, and users should consider using more specific search terms e.g. the AND operator, and " " quotes and perhaps ( ) brackets if necessary.
The full works on search terms can be found here.
Indeed google, with site:euroga.org, is very much more clever, but then that is google 
They make billions out of running a search engine. That is a good alternative.
Now I’ve made my point that ordering by date is flawed 
I’ve added the option to sort either by date or by relevance, and thrown in order by poster for good measure. To keep the interface simple you can’t select it when you first do a search, but you can select your sort order on the results page.
