searching high and low for a better search.
November 4, 2007 12:25 PM Subscribe
I need a search that works. I got Drupal but I'll try anything, homebrew, standalone spiders, anything at all.
So, I made the mistake of leaving my old CMS for Drupal, lured by pretty skins and a seemingly endless array of modules. My old CMS might have been ugly but it did one thing very well - it searched perfectly. Every word in a post was searchable. You could choose to search specific topics, or forums and the results were always returned with the first image in the post showing, and in the order of most recently posted first. My users are begging me to get this feature back, but none of the available drupal search modules orders results by date like that. Instead mystery controls return the results in order of (irrelevant) hit count, comment count or whatever. My users hate this, what can I do? Don't say use google - we already do.
So, I made the mistake of leaving my old CMS for Drupal, lured by pretty skins and a seemingly endless array of modules. My old CMS might have been ugly but it did one thing very well - it searched perfectly. Every word in a post was searchable. You could choose to search specific topics, or forums and the results were always returned with the first image in the post showing, and in the order of most recently posted first. My users are begging me to get this feature back, but none of the available drupal search modules orders results by date like that. Instead mystery controls return the results in order of (irrelevant) hit count, comment count or whatever. My users hate this, what can I do? Don't say use google - we already do.
Tried this?
It's based on Lucene which is pretty damn good.
posted by bitdamaged at 1:04 PM on November 4, 2007
It's based on Lucene which is pretty damn good.
posted by bitdamaged at 1:04 PM on November 4, 2007
Response by poster: spilon, neat, downloading and giving it a whirl.
icebourg, yes ideally I'd like to change one of the less bad drupal search modules but when I open the hood I find that I don't see a simple way of skipping all their complicating rating by comment/hits/other irrelevant things and simply "sort by node posted time, basta". I'd need some hand-holding and pointing in the right direction, like "do exactly this, stupid". ;)
bitdamaged, your link is funked, did you mean lucene and nutch for drupal?
posted by dabitch at 2:32 PM on November 4, 2007
icebourg, yes ideally I'd like to change one of the less bad drupal search modules but when I open the hood I find that I don't see a simple way of skipping all their complicating rating by comment/hits/other irrelevant things and simply "sort by node posted time, basta". I'd need some hand-holding and pointing in the right direction, like "do exactly this, stupid". ;)
bitdamaged, your link is funked, did you mean lucene and nutch for drupal?
posted by dabitch at 2:32 PM on November 4, 2007
Dammit I keep doing this.
Meant this: http://drupal.org/project/solr
posted by bitdamaged at 2:48 PM on November 4, 2007
Meant this: http://drupal.org/project/solr
posted by bitdamaged at 2:48 PM on November 4, 2007
Response by poster: Oh, thanks. Tried that one actually, turns out we aren't allowed java on the server. :/
posted by dabitch at 11:27 PM on November 4, 2007
posted by dabitch at 11:27 PM on November 4, 2007
Response by poster: Sphider works nice, thanks! Not that the other answer are wrong, they work too just not for me in case anyone googles this Q.
posted by dabitch at 4:00 AM on November 12, 2007
posted by dabitch at 4:00 AM on November 12, 2007
Best answer: Another solution is Views FastSearch, which lets you use a View to filter and display search results. It uses the same indexing system, but gives you full control over how things appear. Sort by search score, post date, user rating, etc.
posted by verb at 8:53 PM on December 13, 2007 [1 favorite]
posted by verb at 8:53 PM on December 13, 2007 [1 favorite]
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posted by icebourg at 12:39 PM on November 4, 2007