Search by Relevance
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The current system of searching makes it really difficult to find what your actually looking for. Searching by vote just gets completely random top saves with none of the keywords that you searched for in the title and half of them dont even have a single keyword in their tags, searching by date is almost just as bad; more random saves but usuallly with one or two keywords though still highly irrelevant.
I did a search for "cray tutorial" and the first save with the title "cray tutorial" was on page 12
I suggest either adding search by relevance or prioritizing title relevance (save title matches text in search bar), doing so would benefit players who are trying to find something that isnt extremely common and also help people who make specialized things to get views on their saves.
Does anyone else have a problem with this? opinions?~
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TPT's search is ok ... but has issues sometimes. I think your problem is that it was showing all saves that had either 'cray' or 'tutorial' in the title or tags, which has way too many results. There is no in game way to limit it to 'cray tutorial' as one word. The one on the website here is sometimes better (hard to find though): https://powdertoy.co.uk/Search.html?Search_Query=cray+tutorial&Search_Sort=rel&Search_For=saves
There is also the stuff on jacksonmj's website:
http://powdertoythings.co.uk/Powder/Saves/Search.html?Search_Query=search%3Asimilartitle+%22cray+tutorial%22
http://powdertoythings.co.uk/Powder/Saves/Search.html?Search_Query=cray+tutorial -
"Cray tutorial" has a space which i suppose could be used as an isolation symbol to allow the words to be individually searched, like how some search mechanics on websites ive seen use + and , as "and/or" filters. a search mechanic could find all saves containing any of the keywords and have a counter of sorts to prioritize titles with higher keyword counts to maximize relevance
Not sure if thats possible for you just considering methods
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There is a secret search mode on my website which does support and/or/not (using & | ! ), and brackets to combine them. However, sorting the results from that search mode by relevance to the search query is not yet implemented.
For example:
searches for titles containing 'city' and not containing 'destroyable'.
Edit: also, the new search on this website seems to work with a similar syntax: https://powdertoy.co.uk/Search.html?Search_Query=potato+%26+%28ninja+|+exploding%29&Search_Sort=rel&Search_For=saves
But there doesn't appear to be a JSON interface for it, so it'd be difficult to use in game at the moment.
Edited 5 times by jacksonmj. Last: 25th Jan 2015 -
We cannot, we have no control over how the in-game searching works. Only Simon can change that, and he doesn't turn up very often these days.
The only thing we can do is advise on other methods of searching, as has been done above.
Edited once by jacksonmj. Last: 26th Jan 2015 -
This is why Simon should allow you guys to "edit" the website and in-game searching works.
Its a good idea but the devs have to let Simon do this.
