Mod searching

[Nasdar210]

Before the Nexus site update, the search engine worked slightly better due to few small functionalities it had, but currently lacks.

 

First of them is name filtering in search bar - that you could refine your results the same way you do it in any search engine like Google by e.g. adding words to exclude by inserting a minus before the said word. It was extremely useful in a range of cases.

Consider this example: you want to find some mods that made the sky look prettier. In the search bar you type "sky" and hit enter. But what you get is not a single result about sky - instead you get everything that has got "Skyrim" in its title. Before the update that was no real problem as at this point you simply added "-skyrim" in the name search bar (so the whole sentence was "sky -skyrim") and you most likely got what you wanted. Now, however, that is not the case as the current search engine hasn't got this functionality - it only works as "file name contains" and nothing more.

I believe either restoring name filtering in search bar or at least adding a new bar for "file name does not contains" would be extremely useful and helpful in searching many mod, particularly many niche ones.

 

The second thing is that now the search engine sorts the results by the date published by default. Before the update it was the endorsements (could be downloads, I am not entirely sure), which was vastly better - I'd say everybody wants to find the best mods, not the newest ones (which are most often very crappy). And right now, to do that, we have to change the sorting method every time we issue a new search - just because of the default sorting method. It gets really irritating after just few searches.

Thus, changing the default sorting method back to endorsements would be a slight, but very meaningful improvement to comfort of navigating the site.

[BigBizkit]

I think you are making some sound suggestions there. Overhauling the search on the site is definitely on our list, it is just that our webteam is at the moment very busy with other tasks. It might still take a while until we can get to improving the search system, but suggestions and community input on it are always appreciated. :thumbsup:

[Deleted53237921User]

If we are going to open the code on the search engine, can I add one other suggestion. How about a "Search within results" option. This would allow a user to auger down on their search.

[Nasdar210]

Great to hear my suggestions are appreciated :) I fully understand and can't wait to see the changes in the future. Would be gracious to be kept updated!