[WIP] TES Search

Post » Sun Oct 09, 2011 9:42 am

At some point soon (within a day), it should start indexing modhistory.fliggerty.com :)

It is only indexing http://modhistory.fliggerty.com/index.php?cid=5 at the moment. I don't know how many of the files are going to be moved from the unprocessed section?


:goodjob:

Ideally, all of them will be moved. Unfortunately it seems that my volunteers pretty much disappeared. I've been working on some tools to help automate it to an extent, but those things involve a bit of a learning curve, and depends upon there being a proper readme. So until I get done with those, and/or a few more volunteers come along willing to help sort things out, I don't anticipate it changing.
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Chenae Butler
 
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Post » Sun Oct 09, 2011 7:58 am

As a quick UI question, how useful was it having the start of the descriptions visible on the search page without having to click on the link to get it to load it?


What do you mean? Is this referring to a feature I missed out on by testing too late?
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Saul C
 
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Post » Sun Oct 09, 2011 11:20 am

What do you mean? Is this referring to a feature I missed out on by testing too late?

Ak, I am not doing well with clarity today. What I mean is do you prefer http://search2.yacoby.net/search?name=&author=yacoby&description=&game=MW&act=Search or http://search.yacoby.net/?name=&author=yacoby&description=&game=MW (I would remove some of the gaps between the mods) of displaying the results. It is 2 minutes to change either way on the most recent version. Styles are no longer that different.

Or a mixture? Or neither and something else entirely?
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tiffany Royal
 
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Post » Sat Oct 08, 2011 11:07 pm

Definitely the second in my opinion. No question about it.
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OJY
 
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Post » Sun Oct 09, 2011 6:28 am

Definitely the second in my opinion. No question about it.


I agree. The second one is much better.
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Jacob Phillips
 
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Post » Sun Oct 09, 2011 9:31 am

Ak, I am not doing well with clarity today. What I mean is do you prefer http://search2.yacoby.net/search?name=&author=yacoby&description=&game=MW&act=Search or http://search.yacoby.net/?name=&author=yacoby&description=&game=MW (I would remove some of the gaps between the mods) of displaying the results. It is 2 minutes to change either way on the most recent version.

Or a mixture? Or neither and something else entirely?

I like the clean look of ES Search 2 (first style), however:

* it's not clear on the ES Search 2 page that clicking the mod links will give details in the right hand box.

* there's no indication in the details box as to which mod the info is for - either indicating the selected mod on the left, or adding the mod name to the details box should correct that (would be cleaner to indicate the mod on the left methinks).

* it's also not clear that clicking the site link bar below the details box will change the details display to that of the site - was expecting to go directly to the site, so currently people might be avoiding it for the same reason and miss out on the info.

* how about adding the recent search links in the upper right similar to what is presented in the second style?

* add the 'Average Rating' (like what is returned in the ES Search details page) for the relevant mod above the details box.


How are you determining the order of mods? Maybe add options to sort the list alphabetically or by relevance.
What determines the default site link for the details? Could a filter be set for a user's favorite site from amongst the available locations returned?

So in other words, I'm suggesting a mixture of the two using style one's layout as a base with a couple additional features. -_-
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Kieren Thomson
 
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Post » Sun Oct 09, 2011 12:01 pm

EDIT:
Now a new style up on the new version. Hopefully better :)

Original Post:

I like the clean look of ES Search 2 (first style), however:

* it's not clear on the ES Search 2 page that clicking the mod links will give details in the right hand box.

* there's no indication in the details box as to which mod the info is for - either indicating the selected mod on the left, or adding the mod name to the details box should correct that (would be cleaner to indicate the mod on the left methinks).

* it's also not clear that clicking the site link bar below the details box will change the details display to that of the site - was expecting to go directly to the site, so currently people might be avoiding it for the same reason and miss out on the info.

Thanks for the good feedback. Given the issues you pointed out, it may be easier to go with a style like ES Seach 1 as it mirrors the styles of other search engines like google and yahoo, which would mean that people don't have to spend the first minute working out how to use it. (The old thing about an interface shouldn't have to be learned but rather it should be intuitive). At a later date I may see if I can have a interface switcher or something similar.

How are you determining the order of mods? Maybe add options to sort the list alphabetically or by relevance.
I am not sure how easy it is to do alphabetically or how useful it would be. However my local version now hasa 'score' beside every result to make it more clear as to the order.

What determines the default site link for the details? Could a filter be set for a user's favorite site from amongst the available locations returned?

The online version it is random, on my local version is tries to guess the highest version and will link to that. The downside is that sites where the version cannot be retrieved (yacoby.silgrad.com for instance) will never get a direct link when competing with a site that does list versions.

* how about adding the recent search links in the upper right similar to what is presented in the second style?
Defiantly on the to do list as a significant amount of people have said they like it. Logging of data like that isn't implemented at the moment, so it needs a bit of work to put together.

* add the 'Average Rating' (like what is returned in the ES Search details page) for the relevant mod above the details box.
I don't index the ratings anymore for the following reasons:
[1] they are a useless metric (It doesn't say why it has a low or high rating)
[2] It means more work putting a parser together
[3] not enough sites have ratings to make them worth anything
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Rachel Cafferty
 
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Post » Sat Oct 08, 2011 9:05 pm

Ah, good point regarding the 'Average Rating' - it is useless if not every site tracks that. Besides, with relevance being more important the 'scoring' system you mentioned would remedy that. :thumbsup:
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Greg Swan
 
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Post » Sun Oct 09, 2011 1:07 am

Just a quick update as people have asked.

The Beta is in pieces on my harddrive at present and I am slowly fixing it. However it is very slowly as I have exams coming up. TESNexus has altered its styles, so I have disabled its parser for a while. When I have finished my exams I will get it back running again and stop endlessly arranging the the code.
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Lisa Robb
 
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Post » Sat Oct 08, 2011 10:55 pm

Looking forward to it Yacoby. :)
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Emilie Joseph
 
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Post » Sun Oct 09, 2011 7:16 am

Bump.
Not to bug Yacoby about version2, just for the sake of making this great search engine known to all :)
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Stu Clarke
 
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Post » Sun Oct 09, 2011 6:24 am

Thx to ES Search, I managed to find all the mods I needed to complete my collection of quality house mods in Solstheim. Many thx!! And I hope 2.0 will be even better.
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Courtney Foren
 
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Post » Sat Oct 08, 2011 8:41 pm

Just a quick update as people have asked.

The Beta is in pieces on my harddrive at present and I am slowly fixing it. However it is very slowly as I have exams coming up. TESNexus has altered its styles, so I have disabled its parser for a while. When I have finished my exams I will get it back running again and stop endlessly arranging the the code.

I hope that beta version is not lost for you so good luck. :)


I don't know if anyone have suggested this, but I think you have missed the search index for http://lovkullen.net/Emma/index.htm. :user:
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Bethany Short
 
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Post » Sun Oct 09, 2011 7:40 am

Just a quick update as people have asked.

The Beta is in pieces on my harddrive at present and I am slowly fixing it. However it is very slowly as I have exams coming up. TESNexus has altered its styles, so I have disabled its parser for a while. When I have finished my exams I will get it back running again and stop endlessly arranging the the code.
I hope that beta version is not lost for you so good luck. :)
Yes indeed :nod:
Bump.

making this great search engine known to all :)
This too.
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Céline Rémy
 
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Post » Sun Oct 09, 2011 4:17 am

I don't know if this a search bug or an issue, but I was searching for mods and suddenly I notice something odd. :blink:

So try I to repeat another search just to make sure that was not coincidence and I search with a specific tag name.
I checked everything and the http://search2.yacoby.net/search?general=BSA&game=MW&act=Search&page=1 was the same. Is this normal or have I stumble on a search issue?
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Anne marie
 
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Post » Sun Oct 09, 2011 12:11 am

I don't know if this a search bug or an issue, but I was searching for mods and suddenly I notice something odd. :blink:

So try I to repeat another search just to make sure that was not coincidence and I search with a specific tag name.
I checked everything and the http://search2.yacoby.net/search?general=BSA&game=MW&act=Search&page=1 was the same. Is this normal or have I stumble on a search issue?

I don't see anything wrong with your search. What bug are you talking about?
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X(S.a.R.a.H)X
 
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Post » Sun Oct 09, 2011 1:06 am

I don't see anything wrong with your search. What bug are you talking about?

Just look for the BSA Unpacker MW and you can actually see two of them.


edit - I've just clear my cookies in Firefox and get the same result >> BSA Unpacker MW twice
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Gen Daley
 
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Post » Sun Oct 09, 2011 12:14 pm

I don't know if this a search bug or an issue, but I was searching for mods and suddenly I notice something odd. :blink:

So try I to repeat another search just to make sure that was not coincidence and I search with a specific tag name.
I checked everything and the http://search2.yacoby.net/search?general=BSA&game=MW&act=Search&page=1 was the same. Is this normal or have I stumble on a search issue?

It is probably just that for some reason something got added to the search database twice. I will sort it out soon. :shrug:

EDIT:
The issue is that I have a cheap host, which means that I can't search in MySql for words with less than 4 letters. Plus MySql full text search svcks.

So I work around this by having another search database. The issue with this is that the search database lacks the features of a full RDBMS (Transactions, ACID conformity etc), so occasionally an error might creep into the search database.

Plus synchronisation is a bit of a pain, with lots of room for messing up.

Hopefully the newer new version is simpler.

I don't know if anyone have suggested this, but I think you have missed the search index for http://lovkullen.net/Emma/index.htm. :user:

Unfortunately, it isn't parseable as the pages aren't put together in a 100% standard way. Tomorrow will be spent trying to find an easy way to put support a local, updatable, list of mods so it is then possible to add some smaller mod sites by hand.

Yeah. If you haven't guessed, I started working on this again.
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Inol Wakhid
 
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Post » Sun Oct 09, 2011 1:44 am

That's good news. Thanks Yacoby for your excellent mod searcher. :thumbsup:
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Benjamin Holz
 
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Post » Sun Oct 09, 2011 10:43 am

I'll second that! This is a great tool and I use it all the time. :D

Thanks for continuing to work on it. :)




KF
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Jessica Thomson
 
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Post » Sun Oct 09, 2011 5:43 am

I was vaguely thinking about domain names, and essearch.com is taken. How would people feel about http://essear.ch ? Or is doing clever things like that just annoying and hard to remember?

The other idea I had was tessearch.com, which is a .com domain (probably a plus) and slightly cheaper which is ofc always a plus.
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Claudia Cook
 
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Post » Sat Oct 08, 2011 9:56 pm

Go with tessearch.com, or maybe tesmodsearch.com
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Lynne Hinton
 
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Post » Sat Oct 08, 2011 11:57 pm

What other options of a domain names do you have thought about I mean such as esmodfinder along with ".com .net .org" etc?
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naomi
 
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Post » Sun Oct 09, 2011 9:36 am

What other options of a domain names do you have thought about I mean such as esmodfinder along with ".com .net .org" etc?

I wanted either something clever or a short and easy to remember .com. tessearch.com was the shortest relevant .com domain I could think of (that was available).


Anyway, http://cdn.theurbandaily.com/files/2010/10/Good-News3.jpg. I am now indexing mods again. I do still need to transfer the mods from the old site to the new one somehow, or just let the new parser run its course (Which I will probably do for a bit anyway).
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Benito Martinez
 
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Post » Sun Oct 09, 2011 11:29 am

I wanted either something clever or a short .com. tessearch.com was the shortest relevant .com domain I could think of (that was available).


Anyway, http://cdn.theurbandaily.com/files/2010/10/Good-News3.jpg. I am now indexing mods again. I do still need to transfer the mods from the old site to the new one somehow, or just let the new parser run its course (Which I will probably do for a bit anyway).

IMHO I think tessearch.com sounds a little *confusing* considering of the former tessource.net, so I suggest this instead "esmsearch.com" which stands for Elder Scrolls Mods Search". Do this domain name sounds right to you?

Thanks for your report and keep up the good work Yacoby. :goodjob:
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Rik Douglas
 
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