Any ETA on when search will be fixed?

quarks

Ever since the SmugMug/Flickr deal, Wildcard ("*") and Fuzzy searches in any part of SM, whether it be the main smugmug.com/search or within an account, has been broken and it's frustrating as all heck. I can't display all photos within all galleries within a folder, making browsing through a folder that is organized into multiple galleries incredibly frustrating if you want to quickly display all photos, or find a photo that you aren't quite sure which gallery it is in. The Wildcard feature could easily accomplish that. Likewise, if you can't remember the EXACT name of a photo, doing a search is next to useless. Searching for "beach" won't turn up photos named "beach_01", it no longer searches for your search string within the file name unless your string is independent within the filename (i.e. "beach 01"). Likewise, simple fuzzy features such as adding an "s", "es", or "ed" at the end to turn up "beaches" and "beached" no longer works.

I know you guys have said that Search is something you've been hoping to improve on, but those two features used to work and have been broken for 10 months now and still have not been fixed. Do you know why these features broke after the Flickr acquisition? Have any of the devs looked into the problem at all? Or is my post here the first time it has been brought up?

leftquark

We made some significant upgrades to our search tools prior to the Flickr acquisition, so it’s likely unrelated to Flickr and more related to the search improvements. Clearly the functionality that you describe would not be an improvement. It wasn’t intended to degrade search in this way.

Do you have a few examples where I can see how the behavior is changing?

When I search for “beach” on my own site, I get 791 results. When I search for “beaches”, I get the same 791 results, indicating it’s being smart enough to handle having the “es” added to it and still return results for beach. Would you expect that it gives different results for these 2?

Is it only happening on filename searching or also with keywords embedded in the metadata of the photo?

quarks

Ah! I guess I was wrong about the "s", "es", and "ed" thing! Though it doesn't seem to be able to pick up the string in the file name beyond those few basic fuzzy additions.

So if you search for "nicebeach" in the SM general search, I get this image: lauraholmes.smugmug.com/All-Around-Europe/Europe/i-WXX6Mzw but when you do a search of the whole account for "beach" then no results appear: lauraholmes.smugmug.com/search?q=beach&c=photos instead you have to search specifically for "nicebeach". If you're so much as one letter off, it will return no results.

Likewise, if you were to do a search of something like "img_0001" then you will get a picture like this: hanschristophneumann.smugmug.com/Skeiding/i-cJWjmZJ but if you search the account for just "img" then it will return no results and you have to search for the exact string "img_0001" to get the result.

For keywords, if we use this image as an example: www.colleenmgriffith.com/Galleries/New/2010-New-Photos/i-ZD8LdLj the keyword "San Diego" appears neither in the file name nor in the image description, but is listed as a keyword. Doing a search for "Diego" naturally comes up with the image as "Diego" is all one word. But if you omit the "o" at the end and search for "Dieg" then it wont return the image.

I swear it felt like the same week the Flickr thing happened, even the same day, I started having Search problems. I remember that I didn't discover the Flickr thing until I went searching to see if anyone else was reporting any search issues and I saw the news announcement. Still could be a coincidence, but I don't want to leave out any details if for some reason they are relevant!

Milli

I'm having the same problem. On my site searching "Justin" produces 13 galleries. "Justin*" returns those same 13 galleries. Searching "Justin's" returns 5 unique galleries, not part of the 13 above. Am I doing something wrong or is this a bug?

Fuzzy search is working for IMAGES but not for GALLERIES

raygun

Trying to search for partial filename, with no luck. I can find se8_5242, but not se8_52. I've tried the asterisk, but no luck. What am I doing wrong?