User blog comment:Dopp/Updates to How We Search/@comment-1888579-20120505222604

I hear a lot of complaining about Wikia from a lot of different people. Generally speaking, I'm ambivalent to it because a lot of the complaints I hear come across more as whining than anything else, and really, Wikias function as they should.

But this...my goodness. What on Earth were you people thinking? The way it worked before, you had search suggestions come up before hitting Enter--completely bypassing this ridiculous new system. If you put in a whole search string, you got a list of results with that string in it. If you put in one word (say, "lightsaber", or "Batman") it would put you right to where you wanted to go.

And instead of sticking with a system that worked well for everybody, you've gone and broken it for the sake of....well, I'm not exactly sure what for. New and anon users on any number of Wikias never seemed to have any trouble searching and finding what they wanted before, so the reasons given in this post are pretty clearly bogus. It broke the search function completely for regular Wikia users and editors, so it sure has hell didn't help us out any. The only possible thing I can see this accomplishing is forcing the search results page up so more ads get displayed to those few users out there who haven't yet discovered adblock plugins.

Please, put the damn thing back. As someone who never really had any complaints about Wikia before, I hope you will take it to heart when someone who has generally been a supporter says: this is one of the most boneheaded "upgrades" I've ever seen, on any system. It's counterproductive and annoying to experienced and new users alike.

As the proverbial "they" say: if it ain't broke, don't fix it.