no offence to the jr team who I have massive love and respect for (and I am eternally greatful) but the jr search is just not useable for my needs I search by the exact title of a forum post, and that post shows up on page 20 buried beneath a ton of irrelevant, or barely relevant posts..in fact yesterday looking for a video on my video list I had to go through 87 pages of search results to find the 1 I wanted
so my solution
build a full search engine using solr
note; cannot be used on jr hosted sites because it requires solr installed on the server (or can be run on a separate server or even multiple servers (possibly can be added to the cloud?) (now that I think if it it might be possible to use on jr servers if jr is willing to maintain a solr search server for all jr hosted sites)
also because every sites diferent this would be considered an advanced module requiring customization to your sites needs
anyway, before this gets too long, the solr search has customizable relevance, it has the ability to offer suggested searches as you type,related searches, "people who searched for this also searched for...." results (more geared towards e-commerce like related products searches)
in short its extremely powerful scalable and customizable
now because I lack the php skills I might need a lil help finishing it off
I hired a freelancer through freelancer.com but it seems hes delivering less then I originaly expected, and now wanting twice, three times the money and that's not even to get it 1/3 completed.
(although from the parts he does I can duplicate and modify to complete 2 other related sections)
I might after doing that be able to figure out enough to eventualy get some of the other sections together, and then pull it all together into a full site search..
however, if anyones else finds the jr search seriously lacking and would like to help build it on my site 1st as a test.demo site then adapt it to your own and other sites (and maybe package it as a module) I would love to collaborate cause I just cant afford to pay this guy any more then I have already.
so far, I have a completed script that indexes my featured forums posts and my main site forums (but not other profile forums (there aren't any really in use right now so low priority but should be included in final version) I should have the photos indexing script done soon, and the site search integration complete soon
working from what hes put together so far (slowly) it shouldn't be hard at all for someone who knows the code and module development to recreate and adapt it to each section
i'm going to try to do as much as I can on my own, but its a lot of trial and error (mostly error) for me to get it done i'm sure many of you could do more in an hour then I can in 4 days
once complete id love to share it with everyone whod want to use it (if I get help from an established developer whod want to offer it for sale that would be quite alright with me but since I have invested much more then I can afford already, if ya wanna share a lil % that would be cool)
if I don't get help, i'll probably just offer it as a detailed advanced tip free)
final note, although I'm developing this for a far better site search, what its built on can be used to develop a full web search engine, in fact duckduckgo is built on it,
I had literaly tried 100 other site search solutions even bought a couple that were total failures
looked into hosted solutions (because of the size of my site most would charge me 50,000 a month!)
after a good 4 months of searching ..solr was the only option that made sense and will be a massive improvement on the jr search
I should have a partial demo on at least a couple site sections in a couple weeks..ish
anyone willing to help can help offer a drasticly improved search option
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soaringeagle
head dreadhead at dreadlocks site
glider pilot student and member/volunteer coordinator with freedoms wings international soaring for people with disabilities
updated by @soaringeagle: 09/28/15 11:14:50AM
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