The STEEMIT.COM search engine stinks. Come on, Google Custom search?
The STEEMIT.COM search engine stinks. Come on, Google Custom search?
This is how NOT to design a search engine for STEEM.
I had three search engines on my website... 20 years ago. But this is all we get for STEEM on Steemit.com?
We can sort search results by:
- Relevance (the default), and
- Date
Whoopee! We are high tech now!
Look at us!
Ok, not so much. This is pretty pathetic. Number one, it is not likely that I will care about posts that are older than about 7 days. In fact the post relvant posts will be less than 24 hours old.
The other glaring issue is that it is not intuitive how to list just a single person's posts. Nor is it possible to search only comments.
Bad search Result #1
I try to search for my excellent World's Most Dangerous Introduction Post: Part 1. Google? Google? Nope! I see Part 4 listed, but not 1, 2, or 3! And no way to find the others quickly.
Bad search Result #2
Next, I try to look for my awesome money-saving article for Wal-Mart, and I don't find it at all! Oh noes!
Lovely ads, though.
Bad search Result #3
And lastly, what about my article on HTML tricks for STEEMIANS? Nope. It's nowhere to be found!
This is a broken search engine. Take it from me, please. I had a content search on my website 20 years ago (see my introduction), and as far as I can remember, it was more powerful and more intuitive than this Google Custom search.
The search results page is missing:
- Dates and time of posting,
- Number of upvotes,
- Monetary value,
- Username of person posting (except when the title is short)
- A way to sort by username, value,
- Conformity of design to the Hot, Trending, Blog pages
But it does offer:
- Google ads! Yay, are we rich yet?!
Please comment if you agree or if you know of a workaround. And check out the articles I was trying to search!
Propose something better and commit the changes:
https://github.com/steemit/condenser
I think I took computer science courses before relational databases were a thing, before dynamic web content had been invented, and before Linux. In the meantime, languages have changed, and I have stayed away from executable code.
I can develop the flowchart maybe.
But even you probably know that popping in a few database calls, pulling out the required search details, and writing the formatting is going to need a handful of code developers with the same goals. You know any? I don't.
Even something like what phpBB2 generates would be nice.
Example: http://www.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/search.php
This actually says copyright 2005. It has a keyword search, an author search, and permits forums/categories and either topics or posts to be searched. All of the switches are there that can serve as analogous to STEEM's structure and relational database.
There could even be a blockchain search or at least a public key search. I would say that instead of reinventing the wheel, to use this type of code... but I am not sure if PHP is permitted or not. It's always served me well on my websites.
So there's a roadmap. Do what they did. The phpBB code also has superior formatting capabilities that make using steemit.com a chore.
Surely a lot of other folks on STEEM would appreciate a few more bells and whistles than the spartan story formatter from Github.
I am much more familiar with website development than blockchains or server executables.
Constructive criticism, I'm sure everyone stops using it after trying once or twice. I did. And I noticed Jeff Berwick of the Dollar Vigilante went through the same process during his Steem-pumping video, where he said something like "I don't really like this 'Search Engine,' let me go over to Google to..."
But it's beyond my depths so I have just wondered why should it be. Why not some state-of-the-art Duck-Duck-Go, or whatever, or why have it at all if it doesn't work?
And what is the best process to change it? What's the workaround, who knows?
Scroll up for my comment where I show a screen shot of the phpBB search engine... that is over 10 years old I believe. It has all the elements needed, and could probably be implemented in a short period of time in PHP and probably some Ajax if you get a little fancy with it.
The fact that Google is involved in this platform at all puts me off, the fact that is is not even that functional is additionally irritating.
I would really like more details and ideas. Did you like mine? (Some in the comments above ya.)
Yes, I thought your suggestions were good. Some Steem specific options might be good too. Primarily though, as a fan of privacy I am not a fan of any integration of Google. For this reason alone I would support an internal system in its place.
I would imagine that it helps to have Google crawl the site. So I am not against the custom search browsing Steemit.com. But it needs to be a lot more robust. The cookie-cutter search engine I see looks like 20-year-old searches with a few text ads that fill up the first screen of "results."