What the bloody hell have you done to the search function??????

[Vidax]

and whatever it is UNDO IT!!!

it doesnt work at all now

I so wish it would put the most recent at the top. Just did a test search for something and the top hit was from 2009...

Hi there, OP. Can you let us know a bit more about the specific issue you're having with the search function?

@chisanunian we are currently working on making the date ranges in search more user-friendly, so please do bear with us.

It's unusable

Searching without date ranges makes searching pretty much impossible. Previously I could search a single day if I wanted to (and I frequently did) so got far fewer hits.

Also if I enter a search word now, only titles with the word are found..previously any post containing the word would come up...to be fair maybe this still happens but they just get lost among thousands of other posts.

Another issue occurs when searching posts by a particular poster - there's a drop down box with usernames, but many usernames don't seem to be on it. If I type in the name (double checking spelling) it's often not recognised.

Simply put, the search function is more or less unusable now. I used to use it a lot to search for topics of interest and I just can't do that any more.

Why is it taking so long to fix?

It's reduced the troll hunting and derailment on threads, with an OP having their history searched. I think that's a good thing.

We're not all trolls you know!😀

I was searching for a quote I had made myself yesterday but couldn't do it, so had to wade through pages of text to find it. (Someone had misquoted me, so I needed to check back to my previous comment, made a day or two earlier, before replying.)

Also, I find that I often meet the same usernames on threads - clearly people with the same interests as I do. So, if I can't spot a topic of interest on Active, I've sometimes searched using one of these names and nearly always find a topic of interest that way. Like minds and all that.

Anyway, my point is that searching usernames isn't always (or even usually) a nefarious activity @Actons.

Agree - it's dreadful now. Not being able to search for a post that has a word in it or for a post within a certain date range is an absolute pita. Did the testers really think this was an improvement on the previous search function?

Totally agree that it's a nightmare not being able to get to specific posts when I search by a key word or by a name (usually mine) - I don't want a list of the threads, I want to see the posts like before. Noted that the date things is being worked on.

It comes up in date order for me and has done since the update?

It’s utterly awful. I was searching for a holiday resort k know has been posted about on here and it came up with 3 irrelevant results from 10 years ago and nothing else. Google works better currently!

I’ve stopped bothering searching anything now as it’s too much aggro. It’s unusable.

I didn't think it was possible to make Advanced Search worse. I was wrong.

It's not being able to find posts by username that I hate. And no I'm not doing it to trollhunt. Sometimes it's my own posts I want to find, sometimes it's posters who I just find interesting, and sometimes it's posters with the same taste in books or something.
I don't want a link to the whole thread that can be 40 pages long. I want to be able to see the start of the post, click on it, and go straight to it.

Exactly this.
And often a poster will say something like ‘you may remember my previous thread’, and the previous thread will have all the useful backstory in, so it’s useful to be able to find it so the OP doesn’t have to repeat all the details on the new thread.

Please could you at least tell us what the new search function SHOULD do?

yes atm it’s shite
but I’m ok with that as long as ultimately same if not better functionality than before the “upgrade” (in the loosest sense of the word)

Sorry I agree too, the search is really bad. Yesterday I tried to use the search to find a thread about a specific thing and it came up with 3 threads from over a year ago.
I used to use advanced search a lot (rather than the search bar) and it was really good at finding threads, especially from specific dates or from talk categories. It didn't always work well so sometimes using Google was better, but still a vast improvement on the current search.

Yeah, I use Google+Mumsnet to search for specific topics of interest. I used to do that anyway as the AS function wasn't perfect.

Likewise. Honestly it was appalling before the update but now its just not even worth having.

It's almost like MNHQ went out of their way to make it worse.

This. I have tried searching for threads that I know I've been on and not been able to find them. I still can't quite believe the update was launched with the search functionality as it is (i.e. not functioning).

Mine wasn't working yesterday but is now, on iPhone app.

I'm very confused about the search function

I wanted to search for a particular famous person to see if there'd been any posts recently.

The date range offered is...

01/01/70 to 01/01/70

And there's no way at all to change that?

So basically... there is no search function at all for me.

Also, why does it bring up words that are spelled similarly? I wanted to search for a thread I’d seen a while ago on Savita Halappanavar, so I put “Savita” in the search field. I got thousands of results about sanitary towels etc.

Today I cannot see anything, the magnifying glass does NOTHING!!

When I can find something it doesn't actually filter by user

Also it only gives you the users that are like the words you’re trying to put in, not the actual words. So if I typed in “supermum20182747” it will return results for about 10 users with super mum in their name but not the one you want

If I search for my own posts I get no, zero, results. This is unsurprising as the date range is set 01/01/1970- 01/01/1970, with no obvious way to change it (the sliders don't do anything).

I'd post a screenshot of the search results but I can't add images now. Clicking on Add image doesn't do anything.