We have some exciting news to share!
We just added a beta version of the live-search functionality to the inSpired community. We're previewing and testing this feature here on inSpired before we're making it available on the latest community templates.
Please give the new search a try and tell us what you think:
- Did you find what you were looking for more easily?
- Do the search-results (in the dropdown) meet your expectations?
- Which information do you expect to see when searching?
- Do you think searching on your mobile/tablet is accessible enough?
- Are some items appearing too often, not enough, too far down in the results, or not at all?
How does the search algorithm work?
Search algorithms are very complex and a are affected by a lot of rules and attributes. When searching for something these are the attributes that we index (ordered by importance):
- Title
- First post
- Answer
- Reply
- Tags
- Category
- Parent Category
Then a ranking formula is applied to configure how hits are sorted. This formula compares each criteria one after another. Amongst these criteria are: number of words from the query that match, typos, the position of the matching words, is the topic type an article (y/n) was the topic solved (y/n), when was the topic last updated, the number of likes, views and replies on a topic.
When will live-search be available in my community?
When live-search and the search results are returning the expected results. When is that? That's hard to tell. We're still tweaking the searchable attributes, ranking formula (getting you the best results), UI and UX, so If you have any questions, ideas or other feedback about this feature (positive or negative) let us know.
We will keep you posted here on inSpired on improvements and new milestones.
