×
  • remind me tomorrow
  • remind me next week
  • never remind me
Subscribe to the ANN Newsletter • Wake up every Sunday to a curated list of ANN's most interesting posts of the week. read more

Forum - View topic
Odd glitch in search results




Anime News Network Forum Index -> Site-related -> Bugs & Technical Questions
View previous topic :: View next topic  
Author Message
Gina Szanboti



Joined: 03 Aug 2008
Posts: 11329
PostPosted: Fri Sep 30, 2016 2:34 am Reply with quote
I was searching on B Project because I was curious if there was any discussion of it anywhere (the ending was wtf and I didn't want to start a new thread just for that).

So searching on "B Project" "In the Forum" gave me pages and pages of results, but most of them not only have nothing to do with that title, but the text shown in the list is the same, regardless of the topic (there were some genuine hits).

Here, a picture's worth 1000 words (notice in the 4th, there is unique text, then it launches into the same lines from the summer Preview Guide):



I tried to reproduce it with some other titles, but to no avail. I'm mostly just curious about what's going on. Smile (I'm using Firefox 48.01)
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
Merida



Joined: 21 Feb 2012
Posts: 1945
PostPosted: Sat Oct 01, 2016 4:40 am Reply with quote
I was having the same problem - not the technical one, that i cannot reproduce - but the one of not having a thread to express my frustration about this completely WTF-ish trainwreck of an ending. So, you are not alone. Smile
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message My Anime
Touma



Joined: 29 Aug 2007
Posts: 2651
Location: Colorado, USA
PostPosted: Sat Oct 01, 2016 8:49 am Reply with quote
Gina Szanboti wrote:
So searching on "B Project" "In the Forum" gave me pages and pages of results, but most of them not only have nothing to do with that title, but the text shown in the list is the same, regardless of the topic (there were some genuine hits).

I was able to reproduce what you saw, but I had to get there a different way.

If I used the "In the forums" option from the drop-down menu in the search box it seemed to use the forum search engine, which is different from the site search engine.
That gave me only 393 results and did not have the problem of the bogus "Second Plate - B-PROJECT - Rewrite" text in the results.

If I selected "anywhere on the site" from the search box menu and then clicked on "Forum" on the results page then I got the same results that you did.

I do not actually know anything but I suspect that this is happening because the site search engine is looking at things that are not actually part of the content of the page.
I have a similar problem when I use the Firefox "Find" function on this site. It "finds" text that is hidden in the navigation menus at the top of each page. That text is not actually part of the page and I do not see it unless I click on a menu item, but Firefox does see it even when it is hidden from me.

Something similar might be happening here.
I checked a few of the search results and did find at least some of those terms under "New Anime" at the top of the page.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message Visit poster's website My Anime My Manga
Gina Szanboti



Joined: 03 Aug 2008
Posts: 11329
PostPosted: Sat Oct 01, 2016 9:45 pm Reply with quote
I think I actually tried it both ways. Initially I went through the search bar in the header (thought I selected forum, but ended up with All, and refined to forum), but no matter how I came at it, it gave the weird results as though it were searching the thumbnails that happened to be on the same page as the posts back then. But it also seems strange that it only seems to happen with that title - I tried to think of titles that wouldn't have many posts, but I was kind of drawing a blank at the time, and gave up after 3 tests failed to reproduce it. Smile

Oh well, it's no big deal, and I'm sure there are much more pressing problems to investigate at this time of year. I was just curious about it.

(I think you added something since this morning, or I was too sleepy to see it then)
Quote:
I have a similar problem when I use the Firefox "Find" function on this site. It "finds" text that is hidden in the navigation menus at the top of each page.

Yes, that's kind of frustrating. If I'm searching for a title in the Encyclopedia, sometimes I can just type the first word and it will jump to where it is, but more often than not I have to scroll down the list manually (which is faster than all the keystrokes for a global Find), and in articles and posts I often can't tell without a lot of extra fussing whether a word actually appears on a page or not.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
Tempest
I Run this place.
ANN Publisher


Joined: 29 Dec 2001
Posts: 10420
Location: Do not message me for support.
PostPosted: Wed Oct 12, 2016 11:20 am Reply with quote
Our main search is Google Powered, and it kind of sucks.

We have development budget copming up next year, most of which is tasked towards major projects, but site search is pretty important, so I'll try to set some a side to either building our own, working site-search, or fixing the Google Search.

-t
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message Send e-mail My Anime My Manga
Gina Szanboti



Joined: 03 Aug 2008
Posts: 11329
PostPosted: Wed Oct 12, 2016 6:46 pm Reply with quote
I think Touma gave me the answer I was looking for, but improving the search engine would definitely be most appreciated, and I don't think I'm speaking just for myself, though I really don't have many complaints about it.

So thank you! I hope you can find the budget to support that. If it comes to pass, you might also find it useful to ask the readers how they use search, and what ideas and improvements they'd like to see implemented.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
Display posts from previous:   
Reply to topic    Anime News Network Forum Index -> Site-related -> Bugs & Technical Questions All times are GMT - 5 Hours
Page 1 of 1

 


Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group