site search? LOL
misterskuts
Posts: 60
Will the search engine ever work again on this site or will it remain a sad joke like every other feature has become? Example; I enter a search for M4 and it returns every item in the inventory EXCEPT M4. What a joke.
Comments
What browser are you using?
It works fine for me, I enter 'M4' at the Store page, and I get 655 items, which I think is about right. Some may be labelled Michael 4, and the search may not pick them up.
See if this search link works for you?
http://www.daz3d.com/shop/catalogsearch/result/index/?limit=60&q=M4&x=0&y=0
I agree. It is hard to believe the search engine is WORSE than the old site.
:-(
You might get somewhat decent results by going to
shop/People/Men and then select Michael 4 on the left hand side.
What does the browser have to do with anything?
It's common knowledge that browsers affect things in strange ways, especially on small websites. Don't ask why, I doubt any of us are browser developers. All you need to know is that browser DOES have something to do with anything. It's probably the reason you had issues searching for M4. The search engine is still poor, but it DOES search for what you type in.
I do wish for the site to be somewhat improved, but I think that would mean indexing the items better than they are now. If I want a search for example for Michael 4 compatible items, I'd love it if it didn't pull other stuff not compatible with M4.
Long, long ago I gave up on using any site's built-in search features. I don't care if it's here, there or over the hill. None of them work as good as simply appending "site: " to the end of a Google query.
E.g., "michael 4 site: www.daz3d.com"
It's common knowledge that browsers affect things in strange ways, especially on small websites. Don't ask why, I doubt any of us are browser developers. All you need to know is that browser DOES have something to do with anything. It's probably the reason you had issues searching for M4. The search engine is still poor, but it DOES search for what you type in.
Kind of proves my point. doesn't it? A search engines that fails to work with common browsers isn't really worth a tinker's damn, is it?
I agree with adamr: use Google. Almost every website anywhere has a crap search engine. Just go check out Renderocity and RDNA for other similar examples. Use Google to trawl through it for you. It will do a lot better.
Way back when I dumped IE in favour of Firefox (during one of the early major "argh-it's-a-wide-open-virus-magnet" scares) the big problem was compatibility with HTML standards. Mozilla, which directs... erm, well, sorta loosely suggests Firefox development, (mostly) obeys the actual standards. Microsoft, as always, set their own standards with differences wherever they felt like it. This used to cause problems with HTML built according to the standards occasionally doing weird things in IE, and vice versa. Sometimes coders had to write bits of web page that would select which other bits of the same page to let the browser render depending on whether it detected you were using IE or something else.
It's been years since I last did any serious website coding, so I don't know how much worse or better the situation is now. All I see from the outside looking at the browser window is that most of the time things are mostly the same, but there are still occasional earth-shattering kabooms. :-S
I gave the Google technique a whirl, and it certainly returns more meaningful results than the store search function. Thing is, the old store search returned results that were more relevant (fewer results), and it showed thumbnails if there were only a few results. That was really helpful. The new one does neither. What the new one does, if you type in more than one word, is give you a list of things that match that description. OK, that's nice, but then you click on one of those things in the list, and instead of taking you direct to a specific item that has that description, it re-runs the search with those terms entered, with an OR in between all of the terms. If you enter 'Loin Cloth' for example, and then click on the Loin Cloth in the pop up list, you get 1170 results, one of which is the Millennium Girls' Clothing Ensemble! I guarantee you the Millennium Girls' Clothing Ensemble does not include a loin cloth... :lol: Take the 1170 results for Loin Cloth and sort by release date, you get ... Short Order Cook for Genesis?
Unfortunately, if you use Google, it also returns results from the forums, which is not necessarily what you want when doing a store search. What's aggravating about the store search is that the list that pops up after you enter one or more words in the search box may contain the names of actual items, but clicking on a list element does not take you straight to the item with that name. It runs another search. I say it's broken and needs to be fixed.
I think it would be in the public interest for Daz to reveal who it was that did their site design, if only to save the rest of the world from accidentally hiring them.
Magneto, the company, not the evil mutant (although now that I think about it...) sold them this piece of rubbish.
http://www.magentocommerce.com/
At least Magneto (the evil mutant) knew what he was doing and had some degree of competency. These guys, on the other hand...