Is Forum Search working? If so, it’s not very helpful…

[FFoxSake]

I just typed in e.g. pod parking as my search words and as far as I can see none of the results are at all relevant!

Do any searches work for anyone?

[FFoxSake]

I’m talking about the forum search button here:
https://www.headforpoints.com/forums/search/

[Aston100]

I searched for Kimpton, it brought up 44 results.
I searched for Intercontinental, it brought up 33 results.
I searched for Kimpton Intercontinental, it brought up 72 results (I presume some of the results contains both words)

[Lady London]

Try external search and just look for pod.

The usual answer to that here is Thistle.

Plus got a feeling pod is not operational since mid-December

[FFoxSake]

That was just an example…

I Was asking why we get 31 pages of seemingly irrelevant results for pod parking

A simpler example…
Try thistle and you get 1 page with 2 results – one is good (from this thread) and the other one doesn’t have the word thistle in the item returned at all.

I’m just suggesting that Search needs some attention if HfP wants the forum to be useful via the search button.
Hope that helps.

[AndyGWP]

I had the same issue searching for status match 🥴

[Lady London]

The site is very lightly indexed for performance reasons. Frankly external Google search format

site: headforpoints.com and then your search string(s) (using quotes where necessary) was always better for nany sites including this one.

[Rhys]

We have elastic search installed on the main site which returns decent results but we haven’t done the same for the forums (yet). We may/may not do that in the future.

[AndyGWP]

Just remove the inbuilt search function then, or properly integrate a google one?

Seems a waste of peoples time and effort if there’s something implemented that doesn’t work? 🙂

[Peter K]

I’ve just had a similarly fruitless experience with the forum search function. I searched for several different things and nothing useful came up on any occasion. It then makes me want to start a new forum topic…but if this happens every time someone has a question then surely the point of having a forum with all the answers already in it to save repeated questions will fall over?

[Guernsey Globetrotter]

Peter K wrote:

I’ve just had a similarly fruitless experience with the forum search function. I searched for several different things and nothing useful came up on any occasion. It then makes me want to start a new forum topic…but if this happens every time someone has a question then surely the point of having a forum with all the answers already in it to save repeated questions will fall over?

THIS! I wanted to find threads on LHR T3 hotels. I know this sort of thing is discussed all the time but all the search strings I can think of just bring up a totally random list of post that contain no reference to Terminal 3 hotels at all – grrrr!

[Peter K]

It does feel like Google poo rather than Google gold at the moment.

[Rob]

I’m not a huge fan myself, I promise you.

There may be better ‘plug and play’ options which, as with the main site, can replace the default version.