SEARCH needs improvement in www.remarpro.com plugins support

Go to any plugin’s Support page and search for any relevant term. The results returned by the Google Custom Search Engine are horrible. Please refine the CSE definitions to return more relevant information.

Specifically: The results include links to user profiles and links to other plugins. The results should be focused on down to the specified text within the current plugin. For example, when entering “foo” into a search it gets passed to the CSE as:

foo intext:"Plugin: Some Name"

That request from the Some Name support page returns very little of value, and what might be a legitimate hit is hidden. Due to improper SEO here links and search results often don’t include the name of the plugin, just a link to /support/topics/user_entered_subject.

In what might perhaps be a bug with the CSE, it seems that the first page is always junk while the second page is actually a more refined and accurate page 2. Do a search that returns multiple pages of results and you might see something like 20 pages indicated in the Next/Previous navigation. Go to page 2 and it only shows “page 2 of 2”. Go to Previous and it’s the junk again.

Search is always an issue with WP sites. I hope that when www.remarpro.com fixes this that a case study is published about exactly what was done – so the rest of us can do the same.

Business case for this effort: All of these forums have duplicate posts, in part because few people search before posting, but also in part because for those of us who search extensively the mechanism used here simply doesn’t work. We’ll all get more value from this site, and spend less wasted time here, when we can quickly find what we came here to find.

So I’m just describing a concept that everyone here can plainly see – but after so many years of poor searching in this site, why is it never any better? Thanks.

• This topic was modified 7 years, 8 months ago by Steven Stern (sterndata).