monkdiscuss
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[Super Search] is a great tool and I'm thankful for the influence of the steroids.
<P>Recent discussions have suggested a few ideas that might help make it even more powerful:</P>
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<LI><P>Add the ability to search within a range of Reputation.</P>
<P>This would help zero in on quality posts when doing searches for generalities. For example, a Super Search for nodes containing the words "cgi security" returns 100 nodes. It would be nice to be able to limit the search to nodes with Reputations higher than a certain value.</P>
<P>I envison this as two text boxes: MinRep and MaxRep.</P>
<P>MinRep would help you ignore posts that were voted down or weren't helpful enough to gain a decent reputation. It's not perfect, but it would help remove some of the clutter from general queries that might return more than the current limit (100 results).</P>
<P>MaxRep would help you locate nodes that were formerly [Best Nodes|Best Nodes of All Time], but have been overshadowed by more recent postings.</P>
<P>For example, [Ovid] has offered some excellent advice (notably [id://20443] and [id://43389]). These quickly rose to BNOAT and were later replaced through natural selection. While I was able to find these again (through the Order By drop-down on [Perl Monks User Search|User Search]), it took some digging. Fortunately, I knew who wrote them and remembered the titles to some degree, so it wasn't a lot of time. However, a newer member may not have those advantages.</P>
<P>I believe adding Reputation criteria to [Super Search] would help. Note that it's not necessary to display the node's Reputation, just to select on it.</P></LI>
<LI><P>Number the search results</P>
<P>This should be reasonably trivial, simply enclose the current results with <OL> tags.</P>
<P>Aside: Curiously, the current results aren't printed with enclosing list tags. There is a </UL> after the criteria table (an interesting place), but no opening <UL> tag.</P>
<P>This seems a cheap way to show how many results were returned.</P></LI>
<LI><P>Add a Sort By drop down similar to the one that appears on [Perl Monks User Search|User Search].</P>
<P>This would specify the ORDER BY clause of the underlying SQL query (assumption) and would help you zero in on useful nodes more quickly.</P>
<P>As an example, given that previous query, it would be nice to be able to order the results by Reputation. This would put the most highly regarded hits higher than the lesser remarks.</P></LI>
<LI><P>Include the poster's name in the results, much the same way that [Newest Nodes] does.</P>
<P>Continuing the example, this would help you find comments by [Ovid], [tilly], [merlyn] and other experts more quickly during your searches.</P>
<P>While not completely an indicator of quality, this would help you when you're trying to find a node that you know was posted by someone, but you can't remember its exact contents or context.</P>
<P>For example, "Someone posted something interesting that discussed CGI security last week. Where *is* that node?" [Perl Monks User Search|User Search] can help when you remember who posted the node; this would help when you can't.</P></LI>
<LI><P>Add a second (or move the current) Search button to the right of the "Words in Text" input area.</P>
<P>This is strictly an ease-of-use thing. I often search by keywords first, trying to get a sense of what to search for. I'm also a keyboard dinosaur, vaguely resenting the times I have to move my hand from the keyboard to scroll or click.</P>
<P>Because the Search button is below all of the selection criteria, it's inconvenient to use keyboard-only navigation to start the search.</P>
<P>Placing it (or a second one) to the right of the Words in Text input strikes, I think, the right balance between flexibility and convenience.</P></LI>
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<P>I know this seems like a lot of work and hesitate to take away from our [vroom|fearless leader]'s study time, but I think these would help us find what we're looking for more quickly. Also, most of them should be relatively trivial to implement.</P>
<P>Thoughts? Feedback?</P>
<i>--f</i>