Search engine output is now a confusing mess

[berkeley_ecar]

I've worked heavily with the Web since its inception, and have a lot of respect for the amount of talent and effort that goes into setting up and maintaining a good site. It is particularly painful for me to criticize the TMC site, as it has proven to be hugely helpful to me in the past, during the times I was planning a purchase, equipping my new Model S with various helpful accessories, and learning about optimal use of the vehicle. I recommended the site warmly to many others. I stepped away for several months, and upon returning to the site am deeply dismayed by the changes I see. I won't repeat complaints others have shared about changes to the GUI, which I largely share, instead focusing on the one thing that makes the site much less useful than it used to be: the search engine.
Formerly, it was trivial to enter a few words into the search field, and find relevant postings. The new system is apparently built on a platform known as "Threadloom," and the output is a word-salad of a mess. Apologies in advance if this has already been brought up by others, but I don't trust the search engine to tell me if it has been.
I sincerely hope this can be addressed; as it stands, I fear I will not be able to use and contribute to the forum, nor recommend it to others.

 

[berkeley_ecar]

My thanks go to Danny of the from support team, who pointed out that the much more simply formatted output of "Elastic Search" (as opposed to the word-salad mess from the Threadloom search engine) can be displayed by preference by opening up the Settings panel for your account (accessible using the three-horizontal-line icon for options at the upper left of the forum displays). There you will find the ability to specify either Threadloom or Elastic Search as your default search engine. Although Danny stated that Threadloom has always been the search engine used by the forum, I had never seen its output prior to my recent return to the forum, so somehow my "default" engine got switched to Threadloom (not by me, I can assure you). I hope others find this helpful.

 

[pl804]

Hi @berkeley_ecar, I'm a fellow TMC fan and work on the Threadloom team. Can you share some of the searches you ran that didn't meet your expectations? I'm happy to take a closer look and share them with the team to improve on.

We've worked pretty hard on our search product – it's the only search engine for XenForo that returns every result, gives you instant ranked filters by forum and user, includes spell correction for common and branded terms, and searches over images – but sometimes we miss the mark and user feedback helps us improve the product.

Thanks.

 

[techlogik]

Yes, agree, search engine and results are a dumpster fire. Unusable.