Feedback needed on the Search function

College Confidential Community
21

@CC_Sorin
I just tried to search for a well known user and her thread on winning many scholarships.

When I put in her user name properly, her avatar popped up for a second and disappeared, then gave no results. Her user name is @CourtneyThurston . Here are screen shots of how I tried to search for her thread in order to link it on the post indicated in the screenshot.

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The search function defaulted to “in this thread” but also the avatar disappeared so fast that I couldn’t click on it. @CourtneyThurston 's most popular thread didn’t appear in results when I clicked “in all topics and posts.”
This is the thread I was trying to find: I won $292,500 in outside scholarships and almost $425k total. My Story.

22

You need to charge your phone! :low_battery: :rofl:

1 Like
23

I didn’t take screen shots and then I did something that will skew results, so sorry.

But, I was looking for this thread: Colleges that increase merit - if you haven't yet accepted

I tried these different searches:

  • Schools that give more scholarships if you wait

  • Schools that give more money if you don’t commit

  • Schools that give more money if you wait to commit

  • Colleges that add scholarships to students who wait to commit

With that last search, the result was maybe like the 10th, or something like that.

I just bumped the post, however, and added in all my search terms to make it easier for others to find, so when I pressed my “back” button (after looking for this thread) to take a screen shot of what my results had been), the language I added in the search button made the thread jump to the first search result.

Obviously I wasn’t using quite the same terms as the title, but perhaps there’s a way of doing some key word linking/fuzzy matching (sorry, I’m not a technical person) to link together scholarships - money - merit, or something like that. And I’m assuming this could be true for other things (like schools - colleges - universities). Just my $0.02.

1 Like
24

In theory that is the purpose of a tag or hashtag.

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25

I wanted to update you on the status of the X in the corner of the blue notification box. I couldn’t remember the name of the thread so I searched for blue x. Below is what my search results looked like.

  • The first option has blue and X but does not include “blue x”. It was last active 23 days ago and has 733 posts.
  • The second option was a thread from 2022 that was active 4 days ago and has 3007 posts. It includes “blue x” in one of the posts.
  • The third thread (Moving and Packing for college 2 students in one car) was both created and closed in July 2023 with 83 posts. It does not include my exact search characters but does include XL blue and X-large-blue (in a hyperlink).
  • The fourth option (TikTok Ban) was last active 23 days ago with 108 posts. Blue is in several posts referencing blue sky. Blue and X were in one post but not adjacent to each other.
  • The thread I was looking for was fifth. It includes blue and X in several posts but not next to each other. It was last active 4 days ago but only has 9 posts.

There doesn’t seem to be any sorting by last active date or pushing closed threads to the bottom of the search results. Is it looking for number of posts?

Is it possible to make the search pop up larger and always offer advanced search options? Can you make a button that says “advanced search” instead of the three lines with dots icon?

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