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Filter-by-Date-Range Feature Added - New Search Engine

Posted by (Edmonds, WA, USA) on

Hello everyone,
We recognized that when we launched our new website, our new search engine was not as useful as we hoped despite some new features we really liked. Well, out with the old and in with the new. You won't notice a difference in the placement of our Search at the top of every web page on ricksteves.com (behind the menu button on mobile devices), but the search results have been significantly updated.

The short version for forum members is that the new search engine is much much faster (~1 second to search instead of 8+ seconds), allows you to quickly sort by forum results, and also gives you some related info about the topic such as when it was started and what forum section it's in.

In case you'd like to know the rest of the new feature set, try it out in the Search bar at the top of the page and/or read on:

  • Type ahead. When you start typing in your search term, the tool (like Google) suggests terms you might be thinking of. This cuts down on misspellings.
  • “Did you mean…” If a person does put in a misspelled word, unless that word is misspelled somewhere else on the website (including the forum), you will get a note saying, “did you mean…” with the properly spelled word. (type in “itale” to see what I mean!)
  • All results, presented all at once, with pagination. When you type in a search term, all results display. Results don’t stop at 20 results, and you can go to the next page (and the next, and the next, and the next) to see all the results.
  • Highlighted search terms. If you type in, for example, “Italy,” when your results display, you see the word you were searching for highlighted in context, with a blurb of descriptive text below it. This tells you how relevant the results are (and our new search results display in relevant order), and also gives you an idea about what the result is about.
  • Category listing. Each search result (along with a nice image on most) contains a small indicator of what category that result falls under (i.e. “Destination,” “Our Tours,” “Shop,” etc.)
  • Filter by type. To the left of all the search results is a complete listing of all the categories under which your search term falls. Click on your chosen category to only see results in that particular category. So, for example, you typed in “Firenze card,” and only want to see Travel Forum posts about the Firenze card? Click “Travel Forum,” and not only is that all you’ll see, but you’ll see how long ago that topic was posted, and in which forum category it was posted.

We hope you like the new search engine. Let us know what you think in the comments.

EDIT: Ask and ye shall receive! We took a deeper look and found that it was easier than we thought to re-sort/filter forum search results by date ranges. So, now you can see search results for forum posts from within the last 6 months, year, or two years.

Filtering Forum Results by Date Range

  1. Search using any term
  2. Choose the "Travel Forum" filter in the grey sidebar
  3. Select your date range in the grey sidebar. Voila.
Posted by
2261 posts

I tried the 'France canal barge boat' thing...much better!

Thanks

Posted by
10344 posts

Thank you for updating the Search Engine!
I've tried it out, nice. Being able to efficiently find prior posts is really helpful.

Posted by
15582 posts

Yes, it's better but . . .

I know there was a recent thread or two about the Amadeus Hotel in Seville. I typed in "Amadeus Seville" and on the first page most of the results were for threads that are ancient. The first 2 were from 6 and 8 years ago. Only one was less than a year old (4 months). There was only one recent thread and the one I was looking for (which was begun about a week ago) didn't show up.

Relevance should be based at least in part on age. Travel information that's even 3 or 4 years old could well be out of date.

Posted by
10344 posts

When I think of how far the website has come in its programming over the last x years, compared to the "old days," it's something the RSE IT staff should be congratulated for.

Posted by
32746 posts

That's better.

Nice work Andrew, Kate, and the gang.

(any chance of putting the results with the most recent first?)

Posted by
271 posts

I'll chime in with Nigel - recent results are as essential as relevancy.
Case in point: a month or two ago there was a small discussion regarding an upcoming labor action by Ryan Air flight attendants; I wanted to return to this thread to see if there were any updates, etc.

Using the new SEARCH ENGINE I received 1788 hits on the Travel Forum; they're virtually useless without the ability to organize results by date.
Nonetheless, thanks for your continuing efforts to improve the Travel Forum!

Posted by
1232 posts

Much better! But, I must agree with others that it would be nice to have it in chronological order. A post from 7 years ago may not be as relevant now as one from 1 month ago.

Keep up the good work!

Posted by
7029 posts

Thanks guys! Definitely better and more useful. Only improvement I could suggest would be the ability to sort the results by date or automatically display them most recent first. If you're going to include old posts that have been closed for years then that option needs to be there.

Posted by
929 posts

Thanks for the comments so far everyone!

The subject of relevance is a tricky one and we certainly don't claim the latest search engine to be perfect. The date on which something is posted is only part of what makes something relevant. If our search results weigh the date too heavily, our search results would only be comprised of the latest forum results and our many other content types (destinations, travel tips, videos, tours, etc) would be buried. As many of you will recall, we prompt forum members to search on their subject matter before posting a new topic in order to reduce duplicate questions. I think you'd all agree that many of people's questions can be answered not only by existing forum posts, but also by our travel tips pages, destination pages, etc. Thus, it is important to retain search results with a mix of content types based on relevancy factors that don't weigh the date too heavily. Even if our search engine only provided results for the forum, we wouldn't present it in date order as the latest is not necessarily the most relevant. It might be the most useful for some people if they have a specific forum topic that they remember, but is that the most common use case for Search? That's just food for thought.

With some of the examples given in the replies above, I'd say that it's also good to keep in mind that if you're getting e.g. 18,000 results, you might consider that your search term is a bit broad? I won't argue with you if you find the results to not match what you're hoping for. However, to some extent, we expect that users of any search engine will need to narrow their search query as part of the process of finding what they're looking for with a search engine.

I have no doubt that being able to refine search results by date would be helpful and I like the idea. The good news is that the latest search engine is capable of indexing the date of a topic which, depending on various other aspects of the engine, may make something like this possible in the future. We're certainly willing to re-work things here. Keep the comments coming! :)

Posted by
71 posts

Webmaster Said:

Even if our search engine only provided results for the forum, we
wouldn't present it in date order as the latest is not necessarily the
most relevant.

This is largely the crux of the issue: the search engine, as with almost all search engines, applies a level of "fuzziness" to any query. This enables it to be broad in the documents that it finds initially. It then applies scores to these documents to surface what it believes to be most relevant, making the less relevant documents disappear as lower-ranked results.

For instance, if you were to search for "hotels in ireland" and sort only by the creation of that document, you'd get all documents that match "hotel" OR "ireland." Normally these results are buried and only ones that match both "hotel" AND "ireland" are surfaced.

What we've implemented is per-type filters for both Rick's Blog and Travel Forum. If a user searches for terms and filters to either the forum or the main blog, they will get date filter ranges they can then query on. These allow you to remove older posts from the search result will still maintaining relevance sorting for that subset of results: Example

This doesn't necessarily address the situation when an older blog or community post surfaces in a non-filtered query, and we're exploring some options as to the proper formula to apply in order to decay the search relevancy of older posts that are appropriate for our searchable documents.

Posted by
7029 posts

Thanks Nikky. When I tried a search this morning that 'filter by date' option did not appear. Now we're cookin' with gas.

Posted by
32746 posts

eeh by gum, it do work!!!

Thanks for the clue, Nikky.

I did several test searches and am very impressed.

I didn't know that I could limit the result to the forums until you mentioned, and when I did my results went from the top result from 7 years ago - I clicked the top box and the best and top result was from 2 days ago. Magic.

But only us here will know to make that click.

Can any guidance appear on that result box for the others? I really don't think it is intuitive.

But it does work when you find it - like billy-o

Posted by
929 posts

When I tried a search this morning that 'filter by date' option did
not appear. Now we're cookin' with gas.

Please note that you need to filter by Travel Forum results first before you can filter by date range.

Can any guidance appear on that result box for the others? I really
don't think it is intuitive.

After initially making a search, will people assume that there is a filter-by-date-range option if you filter by forum results? No.

However, I think we can assume that when people search for something, and they are getting a mixed set of content types in their set of search returns (which will be most common per what we've seen people search on), if the desire at hand is to get better forum results, they'll filter by Travel Forum results. We hope that part is fairly intuitive as filtering by a content type is common in other Search tools (e.g. searching for images on Google).

Once presented with forum results, you are presented with the option to filter by date range. If the search results still want to be refined further by the user, they have that option.

The idea is to naturally make the option available as someone might need it to improve their search results. We're not in a position to preemptively give guidance about how the user might best enjoy forum search results considering that a majority does not use the search engine for forum results (though a very significant minority does). Also, when we give a paragraph of instructions on how to use something, most people don't read it anyway and can actually detract from how many would learn the system on their own. I'm open to specific suggestions, but I'm not certain that making this more intuitive is possible given some technical limitations while keeping in mind that the search engine is not only for users of the forum. It is a difficult balancing act, for sure.

Tricky tricky. :) Keep the comments coming!

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