Searchin'

I really hope this becomes out of date very quickly but I have a feeling it wont. I have designed search algorithms in the past under many operating systems and database formats including graph , hierarchical and relational.

One of the things is that you need to test things thoroughly and when a user comes to you and tells you there is a problem you ask them for details of what the problem is,

The thing is with Vocal is that often you will raise a problem and they seem to ignore it and pretend it doesn't exist. It may be they are just snowed under but they should always acknowledge there is an issue.

I have a story called “Perception” which you can read by clicking on the title, but if you search it on Vocal you will not find it. In “Stories” there are many with “Perception” in the titles but some are many years old and maybe are not currently relevant.

There should be an option to sort by newest to oldest or vice versa and maybe in alphabetical order, both simple options to deal with, and allowing filters could significantly reduce the number of records returned, but we are stuck with a single search, which should return relevant data.

You can also search on Creators, Collections, and Communities and while the latter to return no results look at what Creators returns, two with “Perception” in the name and then a lot of irrelevantly named Creators. If something is not relevant it should not be returned, simple as that.

Even in this example, the Vocal Search Algorithm is seriously flawed.

I have known at least four people who cannot see themselves in a Vocal search. When they have questioned Vocal Support they are given a stock email about promoting their stories.

This is not Google or Bing, this is Vocal's internal search engine and it is not working.

That was the first example.

I tried a few more searches and generally, it seemed that words of less than four letters were being ignored. This is all guesswork because I do not know what sort of database they have and what sort of query language they are using, so I can only go with what I would do with this data.

So I put in “Ice Bound Flame” and my story comes back as a first result, followed by my “Never Ending Poetry” Index which contains “Ice Bound Flame” in the listing. The story “The Dream I Had” contains the words “Ice”, “Flame” and “Bound” so the search is looking at content as well as titles and subtitles.

That is a lot of data but also shows that filters are absolutely necessary for searching. “The Dream I Had” is a wonderful poem but it does not contain the phrase “Ice Bound Flame” but the separate words in a disparate setting, so really should not be returned as part of this search.

The search facility for a single input should work on that input as a whole, it should not deconstruct it. If you take it to it’s (il)logical conclusion is could end up searching for single letters which would therefore return almost every post.

Another is “Ken Nordine”, this brings back my first Vocal post and nothing else. It brings back no Creators. Now given that “Ice Bound Flame '' brought back several stories with the individual words in them, the word Ken features in Creator’s names as well as story titles so these two phrases are not treated in the same way by the Vocal algorithm.

I do hope they can iron out these problems because Vocal is becoming a robust publishing platform and still has lots of room for improvement, but the search algorithm is very important.

One result is that I wrote my own directory so I could use the browser search to find stories because the Vocal search is not up to it yet.

Here is hoping for a resolution and we will lead in with “Searchin’” by The Coasters.