Firefox 4.0 - Chastised for posting ...

JohnSkliros

Thanks for the reply regarding Firefox 4.0 beta - it's much appreciated.

I do want to mention that I DID do a search on "Firefox" and got a response saying: Found 3100 results. After looking at the first few, it appeared that the results were presented in some seemingly random manner - they certainly weren't in date order. Nor could I find any mechanism for getting them into any order other than what was presented. Wading through hundreds if not thousands of items wasn't particularly appealing.

Jon Rubin

Well OK - but firefox 4 or firefox beta would have brought up the relevant items in the first few results.
It's not surprising that firefox brought up probably almost every post - as most people will mention what version of firefox they are using when they post.

noksagt

That being said, I think the implicit request for a "sort search results by date" feature for the forums is a good one.

dstillman

fcheslack would have to comment on whether that's possible (and he may have before). For what it's worth, the Vanilla search—"Search" in the left column—does sort by date descending. (It also seems to ignore single characters like, say, "4", but "Firefox beta" would have done the trick in this case.) I actually only use that one, though the Google one might be better for the uninitiated.

fcheslack

It doesn't look like google's own advanced searches allow any sort of ordering (presumably because its their primary function to determine relevance), so I doubt the custom search api provides it.

The last time we looked into results for common queries (assuming you don't read every thread and know exactly what to search for) the google results provided much better results. I'd be open to changing the search box to use the vanilla search again if someone showed that with some default settings it provided better results.

noksagt

It doesn't look like google's own advanced searches allow any sort of ordering

I think they might. See:

https://code.google.com/apis/customsearch/docs/ref_prebuiltlabels.html#recency
http://lifehacker.com/384375/filter-google-results-by-date-with-a-url-trick

So, compare:
http://www.zotero.org/search/#forums/alphabetical
[Top hit: http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/10596/alphabetical-sorting/ (dated Jan-Feb)]
http://www.zotero.org/search/#forums/alphabetical more:recent4
[Top hit: http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/14151/ (dated today)]

fcheslack

Good find. Based on the behaviour of their advanced search I assumed that was a filter instead of/in addition to changing relevance weights. I'll look at adding that as an option.

samuelas

Yes.. there is a lot of weirdly moralistic thinking here about not having searched for earlier forums. The impatience with this kind of thing I think misunderstands who uses something like Zotero (e.g. often people who are not clued in to the peculiarities of the culture surrounding software). But for those of us in the midst of research, who don't have time or advanced smarts to look through all the results, searching for say "Firefox 4" wouldn't help much the average non-genius like me, since the discussion to which #JohnSkliros was directed is called "firefox beta 4"--a total misnomer. Notwithstanding the fact that # JohnSkliros was talking about something a bit more specific than what is covered in "firefox beta 4", perhaps a quick name change of that forum to "Firefox 4 beta" might relieve some of the agony for those who are bothered by the scofflaws who don't search the forums as well as they could.