Searching for mods should not just search in the title

[Phaz42]

Hi. I've recently renamed my mod "Obedient Steed" to "Obedient Steed (TAGS - horse obstacles speed limit)", because it was very hard to find. The only way was to literally search for the word "obedient" or "steed", which isn't very likely. Now, you could say I named my mod wrong in the first place, but all of the words I've added to the title now, were already in the "Brief overview" field, but it looks like this field is completely ignored while searching.

 

Looking a little bit further, I also see that searching for a mod author's name does not work and even searching for a tag used in the mod does nothing! Why is this search so limited?! I'm pretty sure there are many, many, mods that are just very difficult to find because of this.

 

Unless you add words/tags to the mod title, like I did now. But that can't really be what you want, right? So please improve the search function. In my opinion, the default search (without having to use an advanced form or something like that) should at least search in the: title, author, uploader, brief description and tags. I think this would result in much more mods being found, and in return more page views generated. :)

[Pickysaurus]

The default search (also called quicksearch) only searches titles, yes. However, the user can use the "advanced search options" after performing an initial search to narrow down by tags and other options.

[Phaz42]

Yes, but as I said, this design is far from optimal. It's a very "web 1.0" approach with a "complicated" form to search specific attributes. This is fine as an advanced option but the default search could easily return far better results. You already have all the information in your database, indexed and searchable. You just should make it way easier to get to those results.

 

Google doesn't ask you to specifically search website titles, or description, or contents, right? You just enter a query and it shows you the result.

 

How difficult can it be to generate a query like:

SELECT mod FROM mods WHERE title LIKE `%horse%` OR description LIKE `%horse%` OR author LIKE `%horse%` OR tags LIKE `%horse%`

Instead of:

SELECT mod FROM mods WHERE title LIKE `%horse%`

So my question is to get this improved. Please seriously try to get this changed! :)

[Guest deleted34304850]

i don't think that's hard, but i bet you its not at all performant and would quickly bring the back end to its knees.

muliple or and like predicates like that are an optimizer's nightmare. anyone who submits garbage like that in my environments get their query canned before it even gets to the back end and they get a snottagram telling them to work with someone who knows how this stuff works.

[Lollia]

I do understand where you are coming from, Phaz.

 

One of my mods (which is currently hidden while I write up some new articles for it) has a rather lengthy title. It's called Denizens of Morthal - Dialogue and Character Expander. I had to add the hyphen and the text that follows it in order for the mod to show up in the main search results with other dialogue mods, but one of the problems I continue to have is the "character expander" part.

 

That's all well and good, but I have expanded four different follower NPCs (with more on the way) to a pretty good extent. Since the names of the NPCs expanded are not listed in the title, most people never find out it exists when searching for dialogue mods concerning those very same NPCs.

 

This is the first time I've ever seen a mod set with tags (in the title) before. I'm not sure if something like that would work in my case--when mods already have lengthy titles, well, it seems a bit much visually.

 

Have you by chance seen this post on the feedback site? I think it has some real potential for situations like this, especially if we could create our own keywords. Adding the names of the followers I've expanded would certainly be a boon. I bet it would do wonders for you, too.

[Pickysaurus]

Search is one of the big projects we have on the planner. It's very difficult to get it "right" in that all users get the results they expect. You should definitely create/upvote suggestions on the feedback site that you feel will improve this.

[Phaz42]

i don't think that's hard, but i bet you its not at all performant and would quickly bring the back end to its knees. [..]

 

Yeah, this was not meant as an optimized example. :smile: But you can definitely create something similar that still performs well. Millions of websites do that.

 

 

[..] This is the first time I've ever seen a mod set with tags (in the title) before. I'm not sure if something like that would work in my case--when mods already have lengthy titles, well, it seems a bit much visually. [..]

 

Yeah, I totally agree this is far from ideal, and looks bad. But like you also found out, if we don't add extra words to the mod title they are very hard to find. So this was kind of an experiment to test if this would work. And it did, and so I posted this topic. :smile: I'm definitely going to take this into account when creating new mods and deciding the name. But when I released this mod I did not know of that issue yet and I don't want to rename the mod now, so I added tags in the title.

 

 

Search is one of the big projects we have on the planner. It's very difficult to get it "right" in that all users get the results they expect. You should definitely create/upvote suggestions on the feedback site that you feel will improve this.

 

Ok, I will take a look over there.

[Lollia]

 

[..] This is the first time I've ever seen a mod set with tags (in the title) before. I'm not sure if something like that would work in my case--when mods already have lengthy titles, well, it seems a bit much visually. [..]

 

Yeah, I totally agree this is far from ideal, and looks bad. But like you also found out, if we don't add extra words to the mod title they are very hard to find. So this was kind of an experiment to test if this would work. And it did, and so I posted this topic. :smile: I'm definitely going to take this into account when creating new mods and deciding the name. But when I released this mod I did not know of that issue yet and I don't want to rename the mod now, so I added tags in the title.

 

Well, if it's actually effective, then maybe I'll try it out when I un-hide the mod. It'll look a tad messy, but I don't really have anything to lose at this point, so why not? :happy:

 

 

Search is one of the big projects we have on the planner. It's very difficult to get it "right" in that all users get the results they expect. You should definitely create/upvote suggestions on the feedback site that you feel will improve this.

 

Was there ever an article on the main Nexus page solely about the feedback site?

 

I saw a mention of it in the article where Demorphic was welcomed, but many folks are prone to skimming, so perhaps an article highlighting the existence of the feedback site could help draw more people to it?

 

Edit: I see that there was an article posted in January of this year, the one that was primarily about the new focus group. Nevertheless, I still think that the feedback site could benefit from its own article.

 

Edited July 10, 2023 by Lollia

[Phaz42]

For anyone already involved in this thread, or coming across it in some other way: I made a suggestion to improve the search feature (specifically to address this issue) on the Nexus Feedback site: https://feedback.nexusmods.com/posts/1053/default-search-should-search-brief-overview

 

It's starting to gain some traction, but some more votes could probably help to get this noticed more and perhaps higher on the priority list. So if you care about this, and agree with the suggestion, please give it a vote! Thanks.