So… search gets an A+ for locating the only post on the forum that has a unique and obscure string in it. Good work.
But let’s try out some use cases of things I might actually search for in the real world. Say, I just finished a game and want to post my thoughts about it:
It surfaced the right thread just fine, but please explain under what conceivable logic the appropriate arrival point in that thread should be the undistinguished post #42/225, which contains none of my search terms?
Why is it at all surprising that this feels random, @wumpus?
I’ll give this use case a B-. It gets me most of the way to the right place, but requires a pointless extra step to get to the bottom to start replying, following a moment of “why am I here?” disorientation.
I think the disconnect is that my thought process when searching is almost always “Where was the thread about ______ ?” rather than “Where was the post that contained ‘__________’ ?” I naturally want to land at my own personal last-read position in that thread, just as if I had clicked it from one of the other navigation methods.
The obvious fix to me would be to decouple the thread title from the text snippet preview in terms of links. If you want the current functionality, click on the text snippet and go straight to that post. If you want to go to your last-read position, click on the thread title.
And as long as we’re talking about the search function’s deficiencies, it’s got a severe recency bias that makes it all-but-useless for locating older threads. There’s a valid argument for a moderate preference for more recent results, but not to anywhere near the extent that it’s done here.
Two issues there. First is that the preview text snippet for some reason highlights spurious partial matches like ‘looking’ rather than the verbatim match of the entire search term elsewhere in the same post. More importantly, we have a 500+ post thread chock-full of juicy, detailed discussion, dedicated to that game, but Discourse thinks I want random drive-by mentions in unrelated threads, just because they happen to be more recent?! F-!
Compare with Google, which surfaces no less than 8 dedicated threads before getting to the first match that’s just a mention in a thread on another topic:
