As you may have noticed we took down the CycleFish site search feature a while back.  We did this for two reasons: 1) It didn't work that well; 2) It drained our system resources and slowed the entire site down.

We are now working with google using their Custom Site Search feature to search the CycleFish site.  Since we are only using the test mode right now, there will be ads by google on the search results page.  Once we have determined that this product suits all of our needs we will upgrade to the full version and eliminate the ads.

Please give the new search a try by clicking Search on the Main Menu or using the Search Box in the right column of all the pages

Try CycleFish Search Now


We ask that you leave any feedback, good or bad by replying to this post.

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A few tips to help improve your search results...

(note: these work with most search engines too)

For the most part just typing in your search query will generate relevant results, but sometimes you get too many results or what you are looking for is too far down the list.  So here are a few things you can do to get what you're looking for right up at the top...


You first seach for...

tire
this will return everything on the site with the word tire - probably won't find the one you're looking for


The first thing you could do is add more words to you search and try searching for...

rear tire wheel
this will return everything on the site that includes the words "rear", "tire" AND "wheel" (but they don't have to be together)



By adding some punctuation to your search, you can narrow it down even more


Adding quotes around a group of words looks for those words in that order only, try searching...

"rear tire" wheel
this will return everything on the site that includes the phrase "rear tire" AND the word "wheel"



Adding the word OR (must be uppercase OR not or) will find either of the words or phrases, try searching...

"rear tire" OR wheel
this will return everything on the site that includes the phrase "rear tire" OR the word "wheel"
you can use multiple ORs



You can also eliminate some of the results by using the minus sign (-), try searching for...

"rear tire" OR wheel -harley
this will return everything that includes the phrase "rear tire" OR the word "wheel" but do not include the word "harley"
note: be careful with the minus especially if searching for a forum post.  If anyone used that word in a reply to the post the entire topic will be ignored.


These come in handy when searching for something that includes a common word(s), so play with them to help you find what you are looking for.  And remember these are also recognized by most search engines (google, Yahoo, Bing, etc) so hopefully this will help you in your web searches also!

Works pretty good but one problem / annoyance I saw is...

The search gave me plenty of results. When I chose one it linked as it should, problem is it would not 'page back' to my search results. Maybe the search can open a new tab, or at least be able to page back without loss of results.

Ok, I think I have the "Back Button" issue corrected.  It should now maintain your results when you hit back.

Thanks Lucky. The new search works great. Makes it much easier to find thsoe forum posts you remember seeing but don't want to go through 100s of pages to find.

That's kind of what got me started on the project was the fact that so much information has been added to our site by users, and so much of it just became lost. Actually a few weeks ago a buddy said he was riding to Alaska next summer and asked if I knew any CF members that did that. I knew I saw something a while back but even I couldn't find it.

When you count all the profiles, photo albums, events, forums, blogs, etc, etc, etc... there are over 250,000 unique pages on CycleFish. So I'm sure that there is a bunch of stuff people were looking for and just couldn't find, hopefully now you can!

Lucky,
I noticed that the new search excludes the photo albums names (or their titles).

Chaz, it actually doesn't exclude them, it just doesn't always see them as the most relevant pages for some searches. I'll try to explain...

Since we are using google to power our internal search engine, the engine uses all the same logic it does for google web searches to find relevant results. The things it places the highest priority on are: how often your search term shows up in a page; how many other pages on the site link to it; how many people visit the page; and how often it is updated. These all tell the search engine the page is popular and most likely the most relevant to a search

The problem is that most terms show up many times in forum posts, event listings, and other popular pages, whereas the photo album probably has the term once in the title. And those other pages also have a lot of links to them (in the what's new, on users profile activity, etc...). Plus they are typically visited and updated more often than most photo albums. So the search engine assumes that people are looking for the more popular and more active pages that include the term searched on more often in their co.

If you do a search for "harley rendezvous" you will notice that the first search result is the event listing in our calendar, followed by two album pages and then a bunch of individual photos. You will notice in those albums there is a description (in addition to the title) and most of the photos are also titled... this gives the search engine a lot more text to realize these are relevant for searches on "harley rendezvous". Remember the search engine has no idea what is in the the album or picture unless it is described in text.


Ok, all that being said, I can tell you the search results will change (and hopefully improve) based on how people here use them because the search engine "learns" as people use it. The more people click on certain pages in the results for a particular search term, the search engine will eventually consider those pages to have more relevancy for searches performed on our site and move them up in ranking.

Hope that helps a bit

No problem just ran across it and thought to mention it just in case. Keep up the good work.

oops, there was a bug that a bunch of you let me know about. It is working properly now!