User blog comment:Dopp/New Global Search, plus Updates to Local Search/@comment-755865-20120513155524

My feedback for you:

The Wikia global search is much better than it previously was - fantastic decision to index actual wikis, rather than just pages! However, there are obviously still improvements to be made. For me, the search still has too much weighting towards page results rather than wiki results. A search for "books" yields results for Doctor Who Collectors Wiki, TibiaWiki, Jungle Book Wiki, and then (yay!) Children's Books Wiki. Now, I think it's fair to assume that a person looking for books would be looking for Children's Books Wiki or LiteraWiki, rather than television and video games. I also think you should weight the results towards wikis with a larger page count. Without any disrespect to Jungle Book Wiki, it has only 54 pages, and hasn't had an edit in the last 14 days. Search is a way for Wikia to highlight its best content, rather than dead wikis.

Similarly, a search for "jobs" also gives irrelevant results. FFXIclopedia, Leverage and Final Fantasy are all completely unrelated to the search term, and are again included for their page titles - which obviously is misleading the search engine. Psychology wiki is more sensible. Rapplez is back to irrelevant, as is Religion wiki - again misled by page names with Job in the title. Finally, the most obvious result - Academic Jobs Wiki - is result number 7.

So I do feel the engine is giving far too much weight to page titles, leading to unhelpful results.

It is far and away better, though, than the previous version, before Wikia switched to using Google.

As for the local search, I think the tabs are great. Much more intuitive than the old advanced search.

I would echo many other comments, though, that there really should be a "Go" button, as well as a search button. It's just forcing people into an unnecessary page load and extra click.

Hope this helps! I realise search is a difficult thing to get right, and it's definitely going in the right direction.