The search box right now seems to be searching the title, text, and comments of markets, plus username of the market creator, and maybe other things too, resulting in a huge number of false positives. This makes it frustrating to find the markets I want to find; I might remember a word from the market's name, but have to scroll through 50 unrelated markets that have that word in a comment somewhere. (A recent example is that I wanted to search for a market that was about a certain user, and had to scroll through every market that was created by that user.) There's also no way to search for strings that include a space.
This market resolves to YES if, by the end of the year, I no longer find the search function particularly frustrating and can easily find the things I want to find.
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Can you give a full example of a frustrating search? How does this resolve if there is a good-enough way for you to search that's not implemented on github.com/manifoldmarkets/manifold?
@Gurkenglas Some examples are in my comments down below. In order for this to resolve YES, it must actually be implemented on the live site.
I'm losing hope. Apparently the search results are also dependent on which markets exist. Whether or not a search for string X returns market Y can depend on the exact title of market Z. Manifold employees seem to think this completely insane state of affairs is perfectly fine and normal.
@wasabipesto I don't think my standards are unreasonable? All I want is for the search bar to behave in a remotely comprehensible manner and have some basic options available. I should never be unsure whether a certain market will show up for a certain search; that defeats much of the purpose of having a search function in the first place.
@IsaacKing They should be different because the the last word could be partially typed. "covid lab" should match against "covid labrador", while "lab covid" should not.
Hmm, that's interesting! Thanks for the feedback. I think it could be just the market description? Plus, there's some word fuzzer that matches typos and word variants.
I disabled search over the description as a trial. Also, removed tags and added the group name as another search factor.
On second thought, the problem might be the typo tolerance. If you type 'help' it matches lots of things like 'held' or if it's the last word in your query it will match 'helion' because you might still be typing letters lol.
Ok, I restricted the typo tolerance now too.
Give search another go and let me know your complaints!
@JamesGrugett Thanks for taking a look at it! The problem isn't the fact that any particular fields are or aren't included, the problem is that I have no control over whether they are. There are some times where I want to be able to search the description, and other times where I want to omit that.
For example, I'd like to be able to perform a search like "title contains X" or "created by [user] and description contains [Y]".
This can't be fixed just by tweaking what the black box is doing; it's about my ability to fine-tune the search criteria based on what it is I actually want to search for.
The black box doesn't know what I want to see better than I do. :)
@IsaacKing Ok, sure. Well, I don't think we'll be developing a query language any time soon.
We're looking for 80/20 solutions, so improving default search to work in more cases is great. Let me know if you have any ideas for that. (Or, if there's one setting that's very important that we could add as an option, I guess.)
Regardless, thanks for creating this market and holding us to high standards!
@JamesGrugett It doesn't have to be a full query language, it could just be a few different fields. Maybe an advanced search page with fields for "title", "description", "comments", and "creator". Or you let people type operators into the search dialog, such as "title:X description:Y".
For example, here's what Google provides:
https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/
And here's a website for searching trading cards that allows you to specify which field on the card you're searching:
They also let you do it via special syntax in the search bar:
https://scryfall.com/docs/syntax
Manifold wouldn't need anything that complicated in order for me to resolve this market to yes; just letting me separately specify strings to match in title, description, and creator name would be enough.
@JamesGrugett For example, I just had a situation where I wanted to search all comments to see if a certain concept has ever been mentioned on Manifold, but it looks like the search box doesn't search comments anymore, so I have no way to find what I was looking for.
I've had many other situations in the past where I only cared about title, and comments were leading to a ton of false positives.
This sort of problem fundamentally cannot be solved just by choosing a set number of fields for the search box to look at.
@IsaacKing I don't think we've ever searched among comments, FYI.
More advanced search could be a useful thing, but I'm not sure how priority it is.
@JamesGrugett Oh, interesting. I guess all my false positives were due to description/username.
Anyway, I totally get you having other things to focus on at the moment. This is a feature I suspect your power users will really appreciate once the user base becomes big enough that we can't simply check every market in existence.