I’m partly complaining here but mostly wondering why on earth the search box in the VEX Forum is so unusable. I noticed that there were many people over the last 2 weeks asking the exact same question (e.g., “How do I use PID”), and have been thinking to myself, “Why don’t they search the forum before asking?”
Well, I just searched “All Channels” for the term “PID”. The response: “No conversations matching your search were found.”
There are DOZENS—if not more—posts about PID, many in just the last few weeks. How come the search box doesn’t work?
Lack of a search function results in people asking the same questions over & over. Later posters will get less information in response because the people usually responding are tired of explaining the same thing repeatedly, and assume that smart people can just go & search back posts to get the information that’s already out there.
Whenever I myself want to search the VEX Forum, I go to Google and put “VEX Forum + xxxxx”, and get scads of results. Searching for the incredibly basic and often-posted subject of “PID” here on the Forum itself gets nothing.
Is there a way that the Forum search can be improved? The VEX Forum is an AMAZING resource with a huge volume of information; It would help the VEX community share knowledge more widely and easily if people could search the content.
In your particular case, PID did not return any results because the search bar required at least 4 characters.
(Annoying I know, but out of my control)
I’ve found that adding quotation marks to search keys tends to help also.
I would really like to see an upgrade to the search bar as well. However google has had many years to prefect their search and is a refined search engine. There are some improvements than can be made but I expect google will probably still always be the best for bringing up what you want. Google does do custom search for websites though so this could be a feature that could be implemented.
OK, I do see now the fine print that it’s a 4-character minimum. But that still doesn’t explain the general lack of usefulness of the search box. Searching for the same term here and on Google should not be so vastly different.