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XF 2.2 Enhanced Search

Threads related to the 2.2.0 upgrade

thomas

Unswerving cyclist
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14 Mar 2002
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Tonight, after a bit of fiddling with the server, we managed to install Xenforo's Enhanced Search (XFES), an add-on that should improve the basic search function significantly. So far, we have relied on a third-party add-on that worked quite well, but stored some of our content (no personal data though) on remote servers. XFES is running on localhost and is highly configurable.

Here's the technical nitty-gritty for the more technically inclined:

XenForo Enhanced Search (XFES) is an add-on that replaces XenForo's built-in search to provide high performance search capabilities to larger boards and to give users more flexible search options. XFES is built on top of elasticsearch. This gives excellent performance, even with millions of pieces of content. Elasticsearch allows nearly infinite scalability and redundancy by silently allowing searches to be run across multiple servers. Additionally, users benefit from a very small stopword list and no minimum word length, allowing nearly any search to return meaningful results.

XFES also provides support for returning results based on how relevant they are to a particular search query. Users can select relevancy ordering on the advanced search page. XFES also allows to select a "stemming analyzer", which means that words are reduced to their roots before searches are performed. For example, a search for "tests", will automatically return results for "test", "tested", "testing", and similar words. (This is only accurate for English boards currently.)

Please consider the search function an ongoing project that will require more experimenting and fine-tuning. Japanese queries seem to work fine.

As always, I'd appreciate your feedback. :)

One nice feature the add-on allowed us to reintroduce is the display of Similar Threads.

similar-threads.jpg
 
I searched for a few terms. For whatever reason what gets mapped to WHAT. WTH remains WTH though. Probably not a problem, just unexpected that's all.

BTW is there a way to combine terms so they all must appear?
 
We have added an add-on to the add-on that expands the search syntax as follows:
  • + signifies AND operation
  • | signifies OR operation
  • - negates a single token
  • " wraps a number of tokens to signify a phrase for searching
  • * at the end of a term signifies a prefix query
  • ( and ) signify precedence
  • ~N after a word signifies edit distance (fuzziness)
  • ~N after a phrase signifies slop amount
  • In order to search for any of these special characters, they will need to be escaped with \
 
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