Search Feature: How does it work?

1, 2, 3, 4
avatar chijo Nov 6. 2008. 12:43 pm #1
I've been using the paid demo and searching through my projects will be a huge requirement. I can't seem to figure out how the search works. If I'm looking for a particular project and I type the entire name of the project, it's found. If I just type in one or two words that are included in the title of the project, it's found some of the time but not others. Very strange.

In other words, I will be using the search feature constantly and won't necessarily remember the entire name of a project that I'm searching for. This "appears" to be the only sure fire way to find a project through the search feature?

Thanks
avatar Ilija Studen Staff Nov 8. 2008. 12:32 pm #2
activeCollab uses MySQL FULLTEXT index for search and here are a couple of advices:

1. Use 4 letter words or longer. On most system, words shorter than 4 letters are not indexed by MySQL. This can be reconfigured in MySQL settings. Check out this article for more details.

2. When searching, use whole words online. Words that start with a given search term or contain it will not be matched unless it's an entire word.

3. Use search operators as described in this article.
Follow @activecollab and activeCollab on Facebook.
avatar MarkoFrancekovic Nov 30. 2009. 4:10 am #3
Is it possible to somehow configure the search so it wont be FullText search but a regular search?
avatar kaitlyn2004 Nov 30. 2009. 7:27 am #4
I find the search in AC almost NEVER gives relevant results... It's by far the most annoying feature I use with AC... and possibly one of the most important :(
avatar Sebastian Tänzer Pro Nov 30. 2009. 8:25 am #5
I second that. Development should focus on improving the search feature. I'd love to search for files for example.
avatar Nirav M. Dev Nov 30. 2009. 11:29 pm #6
+1

I tried search a few times and gave up on using it because it was not useful. As we use aC more, it becomes more important to have a good search system in place. The full text search is technically a good solution - but is not serving user needs.

We need to improve the search!
Discover a new high in team productivity with our Best Selling & Most Loved activeCollab Extensions
avatar smico Pro Dec 17. 2009. 11:54 am #7
I second that efficient search functionality is the weakest point of ActiveCollab.

We started pilling a lot of information in the ActiveCollab, all manuals, problem solutions, daily maintenance, month-end maintenance... Now it's so hard to drill down to the information we need that I can not enforce strict implementation policy within my team when even I am not able to find old info efficiently.
I have no time to fix the program and keep it up-to-date, so I am thinking now to create WIKI for documentation and use ActiveCollab for projects only.

Even then I will have similar problems, so in order to make search useful, few things you should develop came to my mind:
1. Optional result sort order (by date, relevance, alphabetically, or whatever)
2. Search within results
3. Creation or last activity date range specification
There are so many things to improve there.

For me this is the stumbling block where I have to decide to keep ActiveCollab or go back to search for ultimate tool, or building customized version internally.
avatar Ilija Studen Staff Dec 17. 2009. 7:17 pm #8
Hello smico,

Thank you for you feedback - your list of additional fields and filters is really good. If you can find a couple of more minutes and write about other filters that you would like to see (and optionally how you would find them useful), we would really appreciate it.

PS: Search is definitively be improved in one of the upcoming releases so all feedback is welcome.
Follow @activecollab and activeCollab on Facebook.
avatar roehl Pro Dec 18. 2009. 2:17 am #9
Any improvment for searcing old tickets would be great. We are using AC for 6 month and there is no chance to search for any old ticket anymore. Takes to long to understand rules and results.

I would like to add the following filter:

- result by project, status (active/archive), assignments
- order by time/date, project, priority
avatar Nathan S. Dev Dec 21. 2009. 9:42 am #10
I'm looking forward to improvements in the search features --- I'm constantly finding it frustrating to even bother to use it --- there are often just too many results that aren't relevant enough to my search.

I like smico's ideas on some search features for improvement for sure --- any of these would be very helpful.

I'd like to see a search filter by user too --- so I could search all activity by a user for specific keywords.

If the search could show an excerpt of the content highlighting the specific area that seemed to match the query ... this would also be helpful.

All the other usual search engine type features would be nice... maybe a percentage of relevance etc.

Could someone also link me to that article --- the link Ilija provided is now broken, I'm curious if maybe some of those operators would help my day to day searching until there is an update.
--
activeCollab +ActiveLabs = Productivity
Quickify, Tabinator Pro, Team Privacy, and more
Consulting + Custom Dev
Free: 7 Tips for activeCollab (PDF)
or Go To Next Page