Search and searching.... especially with funny characters.

I was off around the internet and happened on 'Yakhchāl'  Notice the funny (to me) 'a'.  

from : https://permies.com/forums , I searched for that term. ( https://permies.com/forums/search/search/-1?match_type=all&sort_by=time&q=Yakhch%C4%81l&groupByTopic=true )   I got back nothing.   Then I searched for the naively ASCII versioned 'yakhchal'  and got back some results.  7 threads 12 posts. ( https://permies.com/forums/search/search/-1?match_type=all&sort_by=time&q=Yakhchal&groupByTopic=true )


The google searcher comes back with 10 things ( https://permies.com/forums/search/searchGoogle?match_type=all&sort_by=time&q=Yakhch%C4%81l&groupByTopic=true )
or 8 things with the ASCII'd version  ( https://permies.com/forums/search/searchGoogle?match_type=all&sort_by=time&q=Yakhchal&groupByTopic=true )


I originally stopped by withe naive idea (RFE) that a zero match for anything with non ascii characters could be retried with only ASCII characters, or some such....  


I'm not sure that's the primary thing going on, nor how it may fall into everyone's priorities.


Food for thought though.  good luck!

I think what you are saying is that it would be cool if our search results page gave you the opportunity to refine the search?

I have much better luck finding things when I use the Google Search button instead of the Search button.

Mike Jay wrote:I have much better luck finding things when I use the Google Search button instead of the Search button.

I see three possibilities:

S200:  when looking at the search results page, there is another search box at the top with the current search stuff loaded.  Then the person could try to modify the search to try different stuff.

S201:  next to the search box in S200, there could be two buttons.   One says "search" and the other says "search with google"

S202:  if the search results comes back with zero results, run the phrase through some sort of algorithm that would fall under "maybe you meant xxxxx?" and provides the results for that.

It might be that my brain knows how to get google and outlook to find things and the permie's search isn't working the same way.

I think the search function at the very top which takes you to a detailed search page is good.  It's just that when I type something into the simple search field and hit enter, I'm disappointed more than I'm rewarded with the thread I'm trying to find.  

S203: Unless it's expensive, if we could add the "Google search" button to the forum pages it would help.  On the main forum page you can do a "Search" or a "Google Search" (see below).  Once you drill into a forum you only have the basic search option (see belower).

I think I like S200 and S201.  I'm not sure S202 is worth the programming time.

I'm trying to recreate situations where I'm searching for an old thread and having trouble finding a good enough example.  Kinda like when you take your car in to the mechanic and it stops making that sound...

I just had an aggravating search experience.  I wanted to get to the PEP tool care page.  So I searched for "pep tool care".  One result came up and it wasn't the right one.  Then I tried "pep tool".  Same single wrong thread.  Then I tried "pep toolcare".  Still no success.  I figure I'm calling the badge by the wrong name.  Drill into PEP/PEX forum, hit the header for 22 aspects of PEP, scroll down and...  sure enough...  it's called "tool care".  So there's an example of what should be an easy search that didn't work out.

And just now I typed "PEP homesteading" into the search field and got one hit for something that wasn't the page I was after.  I was after the main homesteading badge page.

Then to add insult to injury, to get to the main PEP page so I could drill down to homesteading I searched for "PEP" and got a long list of BBs that had been most recently posted.  So the search seems to prioritize recent threads over high traffic threads.