Can advanced search results be chronological?

[Pinkywoo]

It's really annoying when you're trying to find a particular thread and the results are all jumbled up. If the most recent threads were at the top it would be so much easier.

Hey Pinkywoo Thanks for the shout. What a great idea. Do you think we'll be popping onto the thread every month (for 2 years) till it happens

I hope baby Michael is well (I hope more that it was Michael )

Michael's good thanks (well remembered!), he's a crazy toddler now. Hope you're well, and hopefully it won't be two years this time!

Hi,

We recently updated our main site search which includes sort by newest. You can try it out here - www.mumsnet.com/service/searchlambda/all-search-results
One of the improvements we made to the initial 'relevancy' results was to give more weight to more recent posts - so you should see more posts that match your search term from the last year at the top.

Advanced Search runs on our old sluggish legacy platform which is pretty hard to update, so rather than make improvements to that, we want to improve the main site search so that it incorporates the current Advanced Search features and lets you do everything you want to do with search, in one place.

To help us do that, it would be great if you could let me know on this thread what features in particular within the Advanced Search function you find useful / not useful in comparison to the main site search.

I’m also keen to speak to people about this to make sure we build the absolute best Search function we can. If you’d be up for a 15 minute chat over Zoom or Google Meet about Search then please email [email protected] and we can arrange it.

All your feedback is incredibly helpful and appreciated and we hope to make some positive changes over the next few months.

Thank you!

Katie

I'm not sure what you mean about two different Search functions @KatieCMumsnet, I'm using an android phone on the desktop site and the only search option is this.

Pinky I'm using a laptop and on the active page at the top, just to the right of the tagline Mumsnet is a search box that says 'what are you looking for' with the magnifying glass. I think it's that

Thanks batshittery I had never noticed that before! It was possible to put the results newest first but bloody hell, it's the slowest thing in the world! It also begs the question why a site would have two search functions? Should the new shiny one not have replaced the old one rather than running both?

I hadn't seen it before either. I agree it's a bit daft to have more than one search function. It's not something I use very often to be fair.

Hi @Pinkywoo & @Batshittery

Thanks for your feedback!

We made some updates today that should make the new search faster - give it a try and let us know if it's still slow.

We've had two search functions for a long time and we agree it doesn't make sense to have two.

We rebuilt the basic site search recently and now that’s up and running the plan is to optimise it and then move the advanced features over.

If you have any feedback on the new search function or on what you find useful in advanced search that's missing from the new search then that would be really good to hear!

Thanks,

Katie

Thank you Katie

I always used to use the non-advanced search function as it was much easier to find what I wanted. I'm not too keen on the search results being shown by topic. The most relevant results were rarely at the top.