[RESOLVED] Search is useless
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So - this finally hit a nerve.
Searching on the website is completely useless. Say I want to find Realistic Driving V. I put it in - what do I get? Everything BUT Realistic Driving V:
https://www.gta5-mods.com/search/realistic+driving+v
It's not like Realistic Driving V is using some other magical name that's NOT "Realistic Driving V". ALL it has is "Realistic Driving V", nothing else unique to identify it by. Judging by its 25,866 Downloads, it's more popular than the mods on the bottom of the first page:
The correct result can only be found on the next page. This shouldn't be how things work. If I want to find stuff, I need to use Google for that. Fine - Google's superior for fuzzy matching anyway, as it also matches "EVO 6" with "EVO VI", "EVO6", "Evolution 6" etc. I don't expect that kind of semantic query understanding of this website (though common things like romans to and from numerics would be nice).
What I do expect is, that when I type the literal mod name, that mod also shows up as such! Not dozens of other unrelated mods of which the only common identifier seems to be the letter "V".
/rant
Hope I'm not being too rude here, but this has annoyed me for ages.
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@ikt It's always worth trying "realistic driving" including the quotes, or realistic+driving. Both of those got the mod in the first 6 mods listed.
If you need to search for a word pair, tie them together somehow, with either quotes or the plus symbol.
Edit: LOL, it's the V that is throwing it out... as soon as I added that, it all went to pot... so you're right, things are not working as they should. Grouped search terms should prioritise results that match all terms, not just some.
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It shouldn't break if more info is given. Even by just giving the right words, it prefers to show things with more downloads as more relevant, while it contains less keywords. What the heck?! Quote marks don't make any difference either. It makes it a real chore finding less popular things.
Another example:
https://www.gta5-mods.com/search/Real+Time+Handling+Editor (page 26)
vs
https://www.google.com/search?q=gta+v+real+time+handling+editor
or even
https://www.google.com/search?q=real+time+handling+editorMore:
https://www.gta5-mods.com/search/Custom+Steering (bottom)
vs
https://www.google.com/search?q=gta+v+custom+steeringIt just plain hurts the usability on-website, if I need to open a new tab to find things.
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@ikt You're right... I thought the quotes were helping until I added the 'V' into them.
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Sorry, I know it has issues with narrowing things down to specific searches. This bug was introduced when I added support for searching author names, and I haven't had the time to resolve it. I'm hoping to get to it soon.
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@rappo I think best option when someone search for mods would be an option to choose which mods categories to search within and which ones to be excluded (the searching DO SKIP and any mods inside those categories to be NOT SHOWN at all in the search results). For example someone want to get a specific mod related to police chases. Currently the user / visitor can make the search via entering "police" in the search field on top of site, but HOW then do can EXCLUDE any mods from Vehicles / Paintjobs / Player categories and he / she wants results from the Scripts and Misc categories ONLY, for example???
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@ikt I've finally got around to improving the search results, hopefully they look better! All the examples you provided are showing the proper results. Please let me know if you can find any other queries that produce incorrect results so I can continue to tweak the search parameters.
