Inside Design: Advanced Search

• As @Ronald Posthumus and @Esther Groth wrote, the category, post time, author, etc. are good for enriching the search with context.
• But I'm missing relevancy indicators which can provide the user with understanding why a search result could/should be relevant for him/her: views, helpful, likes, timeliness (when OP or answer, not last activity), solution by trusted member, user-history & interests
• Strong relevancy can be a unique asset for the community and greatly enhance the community experience, but for that a richer set of information would need to be build, e.g. making helpful voting at a post basis to most effectively guide to the most relevant post, understanding users' interests to e.g. suggests from his interest in which category he might find the most suitable answer, etc.

1. What is your biggest pain with searching currently? We simply have too much content for a basic search algorithm to sort through. Advanced filtering will really help our community.
2. Which mobile version would you prefer, and why? v2. I like seeing the topics at the bottom of the experience opposed to an entire filter/search screen takeover.
3. Which filter do you find most important, and why? Category. Users will be able to easily sort which area of the site they want to focus on opposed to the entire community site.

1. Option to include only topics that have unread comments for you (could be used solely to see all the unread comments from either the forum or category of your liking in addition to looking for information that you might have missed while away from forum)
2. Ability to save search to favorites either via platform or if that's not possible, via the URL to bookmarks in browser (latter might be possible already, don't know as examples didn't show the URL)

• If I know the first few words of a topic title, the entire topic title will show up as I type, but if I select that topic title, I find that it appears in full in the search bar, but I am not re-directed to the topic. And then, if I click "Enter," a search is performed rather than taking me to that exact topic.
• I've been using the platform as a community manager for 4.5 months and I still have the urge to type a username or a user's first/last name into the search bar to find a community member. I echo the others here who would like to be able to search for users this way – for example, this would help me find posts that I know a particular user made and it would allow me to quickly find someone if I want to send them a private message.

1. To find the answer to a question or some specific information
2. To see what's out there that they might be interested in
3. To find a thread they know exists because they want to add something to it, send the link to someone, or just refresh their memory

1. No clear chronological results. Some recent topics are mixed up with old ones without apparent logic.
2. V2 seems easier to use.
3. Filter answered/unanswered questions. Be able to filter by date (1 week, 1 month, ...). Select a category.

I upvoted a few other posts on this topic regarding user search field being included in Advance Search, but I also wanted to leave a note from my team about specifically what we would look for:

It would be helpful to be able to search for the details of a post (eg post author, category, originally published, etc) using the URL of ID of the post.
 

Thanks for this!

I’m not really sure what you mean with this Steph. Also, these type of search queries sound more like advanced searches that your team would want to do in the Control environment, and not something that should be available n the community for all users to do (I don’t think the majority of users would use this, but I may be wrong)

Exactly, I was expecting the most recent results first and chronologically served results but not currently the case. How far are we with Search improvements project @xiaoyu-shen ?