I have been using the Notes Forums for almost a year now. Never have I had such a horrible experience searching for documents and receiving responses.
First of all the main issue is searching for topics. The search feature just plain sucks. It seems that adding more than one word to teh search almost always yields no documents, yet searching seperately will find topics with both of those words I previously searched for in it.
The search feature is not being helped by the people who name their topics. Some topic names just dont make sense, like putting down lotus notes and then in the topic asking for help with trash. If there is a solution then posted to that problem how is anyone else going to find it.
My suggestion is simple; when naming your topic use keywords with spaces. Like this; say I have a problem with MS Outlook syncing with Notes; my topic name should read “DAMO Outlook Sync”
It should not read, “um yea, no damo good hElP :(”
learn some forum edicate please, it will help everyone here so much
Tim, this is a world wide forum, and English is not the first language of all the people posting, please consider than.2. I agree that the “AND construct” for searching is old fashioned… and it is one of the things we changed in Notes/Domino 8.
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Its not so much a person’s first language issue but more of a; asking a question in the subject line is less helpful in searching for it than simply stating keywords of the subject.
Your subject example was plain brilliant. I’ve been rofling for minutes. But I still think that Andres has a point here. Without having run any analysis against forum data, I’m pretty sure that there is a certain degree of correlation between usefulness of subject lines and familiarity with the English language. And that doesn’t come as a real surprise.
Anyhow, what can you do about it? I’m sure, everybody would be willing to provide input, even if it didn’t make him/her a zillionaire immediately. But the only thing I can come up with is to strip out any variant of “uRGeNT” from the subject (which would not really improve the average quality of subject lines, but avoid some annoyance).
It’s a Notes application and you are searching a full text index. You use the same syntax rules for constructing a query that you would use in a full-text search (AND, OR, NOTE, parens, wildcards, etc.). Check your Notes help file for details.
As others have indicated, this ain’t Google… you need to construct your queries to fit the search engine design so the and, not, quotes and all that are required. As an alternative, use the search tab so you can get into the advanced search features, now you can type in all the words and tell the query page to ‘use all the words’. It’s much easier than trying to recall query syntax.
For forum etiquette [as an aside, spelling matters for searching, so it’s helpful to use the right words… ], review the link on the right side of the page.
Also, you can use Google to search the forum, you can enter search terms and then type site:site:http://www-10.lotus.com to get hits from all of the forums or extend the url to the appropriate forum to limit the search.
FWIW, it looks like you’re getting relatively good responses to your questions. The ones not answered may be because folks just don’t know the answer (user.dic doesn’t just go empty, something not-Notes is going on there). If some of this stuff is important to you and you need an answer, it may be something you’ll want to pay for help - that’s what consultants are for.
If you can find a way to standardize subject lines in this or any other forum in the known universe, patent the idea and you’ll be a zillionaire! I feel your frustration. Just let it go - it isn’t gonna happen and you’ll just need to learn how to be a better searcher.
All true and well, but let’s be honest: It would help, if it was. Search only for those, who already know how to develop Domino web applications is surely no good idea. The search feature is simply not intuitive. Every other forum software does it better.
And this is not a restriction imposed by the platform. It wouldn’t be so hard to construct a search string from user input, that would result in a “google-like” experience. I would accept it, if IBM said, that this could turn into a performance bottleneck. And that’s why this
“Also, you can use Google to search the forum, you can enter search terms and then type site:site:http://www-10.lotus.com to get hits from all of the forums or extend the url to the appropriate forum to limit the search.”
is certainly a tip, that should make it into the FAQ.
Really??? I’d suggest that most of the ones I use pretty much stink at search also (Adobe and MS user forums for starters). The ‘google like’ experience can best be obtained by using the advanced search tab - you have to select the options, but that is very common on web sits and forums.
Not sure why ‘how to use google’ belongs in the faqs. Glad the tip helped but this shouldn’t be news, especially to us web savvy types. But if you want some Google tips: http://www.edocr.com/doc/59/google-cheat-sheet - have at 'em!
Yes, I’d LOVE it if Domino apps were more intuitive for searching - I’d KILL to have users be able to google search a db on my server (without an appliance) but ya know what? Google is what they are because they are a search engine company. Not a db company, not a design house, not a forum, but a search engine company.
If it’s easy to do, as you suggest (and it’s not just the advanced search tab version), post the code in the Sandbox or over at OpenNTF and submit a suggestion to the site admins to incorporate your design in this site.
I wasn’t referring to any other manufacturers support forum, but rather to the standard forum software products like vBulletin. They simply do what you’d expect them to (most of the time …).
Using Google site search is indeed documented everywhere (even in Google help), but it’s still too little known even amongst developers.
Also I’m well aware of the fact, that Google’s business is searching, so they better beat any lowly support forum on that. But on the other hand, they search and index the internet as a whole, not just a couple of tens or maybe low hundreds of thousands of documents. As you are probably aware, public postings to the sandbox are long history now. I’m sure that not only me, but any decent Domino web developer can come up with a more convenient search function. And in fact they did. DomBulletin is one example.
], review the link on the right side of the page.