you brought up top month and I don’t see how you’d want that to work
The truth is I don't want "top month". What I really want is "best result, filtered by this month". But unfortunately that doesn't exist, and in the absence of that, I use "top month".
This doesn’t have anything to do with sort ordering though, which is based on time and votes. Text search is just a filter on top of sorting.
That doesn't feel like how search should work. It should be ranking results that fit the search query better higher than ones that fit it less. Regardless of how the search is done, that should remain true. So if you're using trigram matching, instead of a binary "does the comment contain 80% of the trigrams in the search query", it should be "if it contains 100% of the trigrams from the search query, rank it higher than something with 90% match, which is higher than 80%." Or maybe not that precisely, but something so that more relevant results appear above less relevant ones.
Without doing something like that, it's just...not very useful. Which is the observed behaviour of search on Lemmy right now which started this whole conversation.
Eh, I don’t think it’s that surprising. Getting a list of comments on a post vs getting them from a search term are very similar operations, so it doesn’t make too much sense for these to have different queries in the backend
Sure, but one would have thought that the ordering in a search is fundamentally different from the ordering in other places. Because you want something that contains the words you've searched for near each other to appear ahead of a post that has those words scattered at random because it's a 500 word essay. You want exact word matches prioritised ahead of entirely unrelated words that include the same characters. Like "enum" should turn up your comment, but rank a comment that contains the text "renumbers" much more lowly. A particularly smart search page might keep "enumerate" high while rejecting "renumbers", though.
Of course, it's true that at least in the current latest release, Lemmy fails at all of this. I hope 1.0 is at least fixing some of it?
At least the search function is still better than Reddit’s
I actually don't agree. This is one area where Reddit's centralised nature is a benefit, because it makes it super easy for Google to index and return results. On-site search isn't great on Reddit, but at least Googling for stuff from Reddit works really well.
That's a page that really shouldn't be relevant, and it concerns me if it is, because the search page should not be working on the same ordering logic that comment pages or the front page use.
Anyway, I mainly only use the "top month" option as a proxy for what I really want, which is "filter by posts/comments in the last month", usually because I'm searching for something I saw recently, and I have a rough idea of when it was posted.
Here's a search I did just now. Despite trying to restrict it to the last month ("Top Month"), none of the results on the first page are within the last month.
Here's a search I did just now. Despite trying to restrict it to the last month ("Top Month"), none of the results on the first page are within the last month.
Out of interest, what is search like on Piefed? Lemmy’s is all but useless. Even filtering by "last week" will show me two year-old posts and comments, regularly that don’t actually include the word I’m looking for.
The article says "Mississippi and elsewhere", so I assumed all sorts of bans were fair game for discussion.
As for your second point, I genuinely don't really care all that much. Take my solution and require platform vendors provide a parental controls API and require websites and apps call it. From there, whether you legally required parents to set up parental controls, you strongly suggest they do it, or you just leave it there as an option doesn't matter as much. Maybe different places can have different laws.
The important thing is that parents should at least be given the tools necessary to be able to do this.
Yeah I think that's right. She's might be the only person who's been in at least two seasons and it's undefeated.