ID:260657
 
With the new custom-google search system, it'd be nice to have an option to order the search results by alphabetical order.
Andre-g1 wrote:
With the new custom-google search system, it'd be nice to have an option to order the search results by alphabetical order.

Unfortunately, we're under the constraints of google. All it's doing is a regular google search on site:byond.com. However, the results seem to be better than our old search.
In response to Tom
Much, much better.

Old search would sometimes give results that were in no way comparable to our search.
  • There are no more hub icons.
  • Can't distinguish between demos, libraries, games, comments, reviews, and blog posts.
  • The new page causes horizontal scrolling.
  • "Outsourced" feeling. Are phpBB boards next? >=(
  • Google Ads, even for members!

I do not mean to belittle the time and effort put into the new search bar, but I strongly feel it is a cheap downgrade from the previous search bar. Please seek alternative ways of upgrading it!

I do like how wide the search bar is though!
In response to SuperAntx
SuperAntx wrote:
  • There are no more hub icons.
  • Can't distinguish between demos, libraries, and games.
  • The new page causes horizontal scrolling.
  • "Outsourced" feeling. Are phpBB boards next? >=(
  • Google Ads, even for members!

I do not mean to belittle the time and effort put into the new search bar, but I strongly feel it is a cheap downgrade from the previous search bar. Please seek alternative ways of upgrading it!

The game search is still available under the Games tab (makes sense) and the community search under the Community tab (ditto). It was my idea to nix the Resource (demo/lib) search because in my tests it wasn't very useful and caused some confusion with the other, similar links (namely the stuff under DreamMakers). However, that is trivial to bring back (we had it under DM in the first prototype).

Overall, I think that the google search provides much better results. However, I agree that the ads are too much and we're currently playing with those. We're also looking into adding some exclude-keywords to eliminate some useless results (like games that have no content). Just be patient.
In response to SuperAntx
I agree. Additionally, we could always use Google anyway, this just makes it harder to utilize the regular site search, which has various benefits as you've said.
In response to Tom
Tom wrote:
It was my idea to nix the Resource (demo/lib) search because in my tests it wasn't very useful and caused some confusion with the other, similar links (namely the stuff under DreamMakers). However, that is trivial to bring back (we had it under DM in the first prototype).

I've spoken about this before, and this seems as good a chance as any to bring it up again: Tutorials, Demos and Libraries are some of the most-oft visited links on programming websites. Why is one hidden under a name no newcomer would guess and the two others under sub-links of the first? I would literally have *no* idea how to find resources on the website with the current system had I not been around BYOND since 2001 and follow the sites development daily.

GUI design dictates that very important-to-use functions be no more than 1 click away from the main interface, and functions of less importance be no more than 3 clicks away at the very most unless they are sub-functions of sub-functions.

There are also no announcements to notify of the changes either, which provides a very odd and seemingly-glitchy browsing experience for current users and oldtimers coming back ("Where did this go? It was here yesterday...").

I strongly, strongly urge you to consider a link for 'Demoes' and 'Libraries' under the Developers menu as well as somehow making sure Dream Makers becomes indicative of Tutorials/Resources. The DM Resources link found in the top right corner of Dream Makers is in itself is a 'weak' textual link, because resources on the web are often tied to graphics and not to programmer-related resources. In addition to that, its just plain not very visible even thoug h its under a 'Helpful Links' box. Helpful Links often means a Helpfile and/or external links outside of the main website.

And right now I can't seem to find a link to Demoes - I've been searching for the past 10 minutes. If its there, its nowhere near visible enough.
In response to Alathon
Alathon wrote:
I've spoken about this before, and this seems as good a chance as any to bring it up again: Tutorials, Demos and Libraries are some of the most-oft visited links on programming websites.

As I see it, the problem is that the demos/libraries as returned from the resource search aren't organized well-enough to be of much use. Essentially, there isn't a quality filter, and searching for common things often returns results that are either poorly written or broken. For this reason, I prefer to emphasize the articles and resources highlighted in DreamMakers, which are hand-picked. The reason I nixed the resource search was to avoid confusion between these hand-picked results and the general ones.

That said, at the moment it's fairly difficult to even get to these DreamMaker resources so we should make those more readily available. This:

I strongly, strongly urge you to consider a link for 'Demoes' and 'Libraries' under the Developers menu as well as somehow making sure Dream Makers becomes indicative of Tutorials/Resources.

There are also no announcements to notify of the changes either, which provides a very odd and seemingly-glitchy browsing experience for current users and oldtimers coming back ("Where did this go? It was here yesterday...").

There was a news post, which is alerted from both the pager & website.
In response to Tom
I strongly, strongly urge you to consider a link for 'Demoes' and 'Libraries' under the Developers menu as well as somehow making sure Dream Makers becomes indicative of Tutorials/Resources.

I edited the menu a bit. It doesn't include the general resource search but we can figure out a way to work that in (perhaps from the current (DM) Libraries & Demos link) if it's really necessary.

I'm of the opinion that the new google search provides much better results, particularly for developer searches, but if the consensus is that it sucks, I don't mind going back. Whenever we make a new change there are inevitable complaints and things seem worse than they really are because people who like the change aren't as inclined to speak up as those who dislike it.
In response to Tom
Couldn't you just organize all the demos and libraries under something like http://byond.com/resources/, wait for Google's crawler to find it, and then implement a search using that as the site: portion?
In response to Popisfizzy
It's not much of a difference, but I liked it better when it was http://developer.byond.com/ and games.byond.com, I don't know why.
In response to Tom
Tom wrote:
There was a news post, which is alerted from both the pager & website.

Ah, so there was. I wonder why I haven't been checking new News. Does new news show up in your 'home' page where it shows new blog posts and live friends? If not, it should IMO.

I agree that there are plenty of poorly written or broken libraries/demos, but the situation now is that there is almost nothing left - And things are still dumped into a completely uncategorized list.

I do have a problem with Google search, and that isn't particularly related to the results it returns. Its related to how it returns/displays them and the order in which it displays them.

Previously, if I were to do a resource search for 'clustersystem', I'd get the 3-4 resources of mine related to that with direct links to the hub entries and the short description. Performing the same search now returns an unordered list of quite a few more results, which are harder to glance through because they contain a lot of 'fluff' text.

Also, I could do a resource search for Alathon and get all libraries/demoes/games by me. If I do a search for Alathon now I get 10 pages of results, and none of the results on the first page except the link to my blog are of *any* relevance at all.
To address some of the concerns raised on this thread:

You may have noticed as of this week there have been a couple of changes to our searches. We now are sorting game searches based on BYOND favorites first (or if you're looking at a guild, the guild's favorites), and within the favorites or non-favorites we're then prioritizing entries screenshots, so when you search in the default "popularity" order you'll see: Favorites with screenshots, other favorites, other entries with screenshots, everything else. So we've made the games search a little better, and it's returning better results.

As of today, resources work the same way. While resources don't "rank" like hub entries do, we are now able to sort by putting the cream of the crop in before any other results. This should make it a lot easier to use the resource search to find quality libraries and demos. You'll also see that you can now access the resource search directly from the Developers menu.

Finally, for those who have been flustered by the switch to the Google search and were missing the old search, I have more good news: On the Google results page, we now have the old search dropdown available that uses BYOND's in-house search for games, libraries, or blog posts. This should give us the best of both worlds: Google's keen eye for relevant blog/comment results, and BYOND's searches for specific kinds of hub entries.

We appreciate all the feedback so far and we're making sure to do everything we can to make the BYOND website easy to navigate and easy to find quality material on.

Lummox JR
In response to Lummox JR
That sounds very nice! Thanks.
Did you consider returning the drop-down box to the common site search box, and having a default 'Google' or 'whole site' etc option available? It'd make it even easier to make best use of both searching options.
In response to Kaioken
Kaioken wrote:
That sounds very nice! Thanks.
Did you consider returning the drop-down box to the common site search box, and having a default 'Google' or 'whole site' etc option available? It'd make it even easier to make best use of both searching options.

That was our first idea, but it turned out to be intractable due to the fact that Google forces you to use their snippet. Lummox JR might be able to work some hacky javascript to get around it but I don't think it's worth the effort.
In response to Tom
I thought that may be the case. Oh well, you can always just press Enter on the empty search bar and get everything at the results page, so that's fine too.
With this new search system, doesn't it completely throw out the weight hubs with screenshots have over ones without them? Actually, all the little icons which show if it's single player, multiplayer, etc are completely useless unless you use the secondary in-house search.

Also, I searched for Tetris and the review was above the game on the results list.