Here’s a rare forum post: an idea on how to improve the forums themselves.
Although the built-in forum search does an okay job of finding posts you are looking for, it’s not the greatest (considering there is no “sort by relevance” option).
How about put a link/search box in the header or on the existing search page to search the forums with Google? I have pretty good look doing this by hand (Googling for “site:forum.unity3d.com search terms”) and Google makes it easy to plop a search box on your page that does this automatically. Just a thought.
well, if they add one theres room between “RSS feed” and “profile ::”
This would be cool. I have never really liked the search feature on this forum.
meanwhile I go to google or write in the google tool bar on my favorite browser my search string and end it with site:unity3d.com (for all unity’s site) or site:forum.unity3d.com (for the forum). you’ll get the result as if unity supported google search internally (until a google tool bar gets added to unity’s site)
two example query strings:
ai scripts site:forum.unity3d.com
“collision detection” monobehaviour site:unity3d.com
I think a Google Search Field on the default search page would be pretty slick.
This is on Toms list of wicked awesome future gifts for the community I believe. Meanwhile, what I do is use the Inquisitor plugin for Safari. Besides being an incredibly awesome googling tool, it allows for custom search engines to be added (like a google search + "site:forum.unity3d.com " + search term).
Most importantly you can map these custom search engines to keyboard shortcuts, meaning all I have to do to search for something on the forum or the unity documentation is go to my safari search bar (command + L and a press of tab), type in my search string and hit command + f or command + u respectively. Very neat.
http://www.inquisitorx.com/
Edit:
My two custom search strings for inquisitor:
(unity documentation) file:///Applications/Unity/Documentation/ScriptReference/30_search.html?q=%@
(unity forums) site:forum.unity3d.com %@ - Google Search
This does pose a few problems…
For example, exactly how far/deep into the forums will google’s spiders follow? If they go in too deep, you risk having your forum software performance suffer. If they don’t go in deep enough, you risk the search function being incomplete and potentially useless.
Likewise, with forums like this one, a search database must be well maintained or else it will fail to bring up useful results, if any results at all. Most built-in forum search databases work by caching the first 100-200 characters of each post in each thread. This is why search results are often spotty. It’s especially true for forums like this one where code samples are often posted ahead of details/discussion elements.
For the sake of completeness, you might want to leave both options open, but clearly marked as to which uses what service.
Ideally the search box could offer to search the forums OR the wiki OR the docs pages OR all of the above and not just the forums.
Spot on, but that requires some ties between us and the Wiki, something we’d like to iron out. There are lots of features to be added to the forums and an improved search is on that list (this has been discussed often so feel free to search for it). We’re talking with some folks about doing that work for us, I hope we can get things sorted sooner as opposed to later as these sorts of updates are long overdue.
Nah you can google search them without even having their phone number 