Meta: Search Now Way More Functional Comment Count

Brian

You'll notice that the search box has migrated down from the header to the right sidebar, where it slightly displaces the diaries and board. I've moved the site over to a Google-powered search that is a thousand times more useful than Drupal's defaults.

imageYou'll also note a "Refine" section right under your results. Right now there's just one option that will provide you only message board posts. If anyone has suggestions for other potentially useful refinements, let me know and I'll try to implement them.

Comments

Undefeated dre…

March 8th, 2010 at 8:53 PM ^

Brian, I like the change -- thank you. Is now/here the place to ask for extending the MGoBoard quicklinks in the right sidebar to the past 15 or 20 recent posts? With only 10 posts, it seems that many discussions get 'lost' too quickly for those users who don't go to the main MGoBoard. Given that the left sidebar is longer than the right sidebar, it seems like there's enough room...

echoWhiskey

March 8th, 2010 at 9:20 PM ^

Another useful refinement would be to search only stuff that has been "front paged." Normally this would refer to Brian and Tim content. Sometimes I'm searching for specific posts by Brian - it took me hours to find that eleven swans post - and I don't want to weed through the other content to get to it.

echoWhiskey

March 17th, 2010 at 11:30 AM ^

If I had known the title of the post, sure it would have been easy, but you try typing Bo Schembechler and Ohio State into Google site search for mgoblog. Anyway, questions was answered by ShockFX; thanks to him.

tjyoung

March 8th, 2010 at 9:41 PM ^

this may not be possible, but it would be nice if we could sort the results (like youtube) in certain ways. some off of the top of my head:

- by relevance
- by date
- by # of comments (how popular the article is)
- by # of hits for the string in the article

again, this may not be possible, but it would make it easier to check for double posts before you post a new forum topic

anybody else have other ideas?

EDIT: i like the idea of being able to search for "front page content", and maybe even to get more specific, refine by the most popular authors (Brian, Tim, TomVH, etc.)

Bleedin9Blue

March 8th, 2010 at 10:35 PM ^

This isn't related to the new search but it's still discussing meta. What ever happened to the idea that you had here to try and "wiki-fy" the depth chart? I would be very interested in an MGoBlog run wiki on recruiting, not just the depth chart.

That could be a boon to you and Tim as it would be many minds and eyes scouring the internet for the latest news. But, it could be hard to run, keep the quality up (although I have faith in the MGoBlog community doing that naturally), and just plain hard to create and integrate into MGoBlog. But think of the history that we could compile, not just on recruits but Michigan sports in general. We could have sections for games for people to give their individual impressions and memories and videos (I guess we could actually do the same thing for recruits). It could be huge. Plus, it would generate a lot of clicks.

Anyway, it'd be nice if we started to move in that direction a little bit. Even if that means just doing your original idea of wikifying the depth chart.

Wallaby Court

March 8th, 2010 at 11:14 PM ^

It might be worthwhile to allow a comments only search. I know there are times that I want to find a specific person's comment, so narrowing searches to comments alone might be useful.

ntclark

March 9th, 2010 at 4:50 AM ^

Maybe this is the wrong place to bring this up, but while you're working on site improvements during the long off season, is mobile support in the cards? Loading this site on my phone is painfully slow, so having access to a lighter-weight version would increase my visits here significantly.

Thorin

March 9th, 2010 at 5:17 AM ^

How about installing the bittorrent module and give mgopoints for seeding? That way I can stop neglecting my family, catch Magnus in points and you'll get sued by the BTN instead of me. Awesome plan?

Also, maybe a PM system?

Desmondo

March 9th, 2010 at 8:00 AM ^

I'd like to be able to search exclusively through content from the site authors. 99% of the times that I run a search, I have absolutely no interest in finding message board threads and diaries...I'm looking for a specific article from Brian or Tim. A filter that allowed us to search that way would be greatly appreciated.

ShockFX

March 9th, 2010 at 9:20 AM ^

If people want to search just the front page stuff, put this in your search string "site:mgoblog.com/content/ [search term goes here]"

so if i wanted the eleven swans post i'd do "site:mgoblog.com/content/ eleven swans"