Hey @revote! I''ve never had the need to search for a specific comment. Is there a story behind this?

We can do some tests here on this topic if you don’t mind. This is one of our topics with most replies (131):

I’m gonna search for the highlighted text in this comment from @revathimenon (hope you don’t mind ?)

Searching on the community (end user) gave me an accurate result showing only this topic:

However… on Control I actually didn’t find anything:

Even when I search Hyderabad, I get nothing ?

That might be a limitation on Control sadly. I’d say this is probably intentional to increase performance on Control.

For the front-end we use the Algolia search (algolia.com) which is very optimised but on Control we don’t use Algolia. 

On Control, I believe the search only looks for an X number of replies in each topic and does not consider anything after this number. Is this the issue you’re facing?

Yep, you pointed the issue:
Search displays only the topics, not comments. It doesn´t help you at all to find the correct topic, you have to read all the comments there to find the comment you are searching for.

I dont have actual story but there are times you remember that someone wrote something but you don´t remember where / when. And you want to find it and link it to the ongoing discussion elsewhere.

Our longest topic has 1200 comments and there are many topics where we have almost 1000 comments. There are lots of useful and helpful info, almost “hidden”, because they are impossible to find among all the comments.

Because we are using now inSided, should we courage community users to start new topic, each and every time, instead of continue discussion in old topic? We should try to avoid long topics?

Edit: We used Khoros earlier and there is search what displays the topics as well. But it also highlight the comment what matches with your search and it have link to the comment also.

I have raised an idea about his:

I second @revote , I have had several cases where I need to find one particular comment, so this indeed is needed 

@revote I did a few tests just now and it seems on Control, it only searches for the words/comments in the opening post. Not ideal but just to let you know - still think this is designed to improve performance on Control.
 

We do have the best answer that has the purpose of giving the most useful information in a question but that’s far from ideal now that I’ve understood your point. Thanks for giving more details into this.

What you say would be ideal, if the search can automatically display a comment from an user. I’ve actually never used Khoros - could you maybe share a public community from them so I can see how this work?

Here you go: https://community.khoros.com

Example search: “Upload avatar”:

And when you click “Show results in comments”:

You see the reply itself and you can click it and read the whole reply (comment).

Thanks @revote, I'm going to play around in their community to see how this works, but I can see from your screenshots that it does look very good, and I hope we can have this in the future. I’ve just upvoted your idea and I’ll bring this up with our product team.

I'm just not sure if this will be an easy task because we use an external search engine (Algolia) and I imagine that if they had this functionality, we would have already enabled it, so I believe this would require some front-end work from us + Algolia indexing. Any thoughts @Sudhanshu @dilekgencer? Could this be added to our roadmap?

Thanks @leo-inspired your update. I understand this might require development (a lot). Hopefully we can have it in a future