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    • why is Tiki search so bad?

    Posted by Mike Nutt

    Hi all,

    I don't want to step on any toes with this post, but here goes. I'm a new Tiki user and, as with any open source system, I'm enormously grateful for all the work that has gone in to developing TikiWiki. However, I'm finding the learning curve pretty steep, and one of the reasons for that is because I find it impossible to get any useful search results from the doc or forum pages on tikiwiki.org.

    I'm not the kind of person that asks on a forum before looking for the answer myself. My job is as a support staff member for A/V equipment, and I'm constantly telling people to refer to the manual. So it bugs me a little when I search for the answer to a problem in the docs, can't find it, post the question to the forum, and then Ricks99 points me to the answer in the docs that I couldn't find. It's just wasting my time and his (or whoever, but so far mostly Ricks99!).

    So my question comes from the perspective of wanting to understand - I'm not trying to be bitchy. I can make do with the "site:" paramater in google, but it would save me some keystrokes to use Tiki's search, and I'm also interested in my site's users having a good in-house search option.

    Any insight? Or does everyone else find the search helpful? Thoughts?

    Thanks all,
    Mike
    -
    http://wikumentary.netQuestion

    Reads: 1890
    Posted by Gary Cunningham-Lee

    You aren't stepping on anyone's toes, with this comment, because this is a long-standing and well-known problem. As far as I know, the reason the search hasn't been fixed to everyone's satisfaction by now is that the people working on Tiki's code only have limited time, and they tend to work on a) things that are a personal priority, and b) things that are a priority for people that have the funds to buy some Tiki-coding manhours or womanhours (that is, when TikiWiki is used by a commercial or other entity that has a budget that the program can benefit from). Believe it or not, Tiki's search has been getting improvements as time permits. But I'm not sure what's on the roadmap for future work. This may be documented here somewhere but.... 😉

    -- Gary


    Posted by Rick Sapir / Tiki for Smarties

    Like Gary says, Tiki's native search is...um...err... less than perfect. Read hereQuestion, for more info.

    You're welcome to use my super-duper TikiWiki Google CSEQuestion which will search across multiple *.tikiwiki.org domains, using regular Google syntax.

    I've found that nearly all questions could be answered by the Tiki docsQuestion, but as you point out, navigating the docs is tough. As a doc contributor, I'm somewhat familiar with the docs (well, parts of it, anyway). We've started adding tagsQuestion to the doc pages which (I hope) will make it easier to find things. Maybe you can helpQuestion?

    HTH,

    -RickQuestion
    Need more help? Try TikiWiki for Dummies SmartiesQuestion or read my Tiki Blog or visit my UserPage

    Posted by Mike Nutt

    Yeah, I figured it boiled down to time/manpower/womanpower. Tags should help some, but in the mean time the Google CSE is a great idea, thanks Rick! It works like a charm.
    Mike
    -
    http://wikumentary.netQuestion