why flarum search is bad and how to improve with a new extension?

Hari

i have no knowledge in this matter but i need suggestions and information related to flarum search. i have gone through many posts related to the search all i see is its something related to UTF-8

i have seen few answers saying an elastic search driver will improve the search feature but my question is how does WordPress do this without those fancy tools? why WordPress search works perfectly without any additional
optimization?

askvortsov 🔍 Better support for alternative search drivers, along with a refactor of our frontend search UI.

do i need to wait till flarum 2.0 and it will work like WordPress search? (Chinese and Hindi similar characters suport)

Hari

Any answer? Please

Hari

Discourse search working absolutely fine with non native languages

https://try.discourse.org/search?context=topic&context_id=1408&q=%E0%B0%A4%E0%B1%86%E0%B0%B2%E0%B1%81%E0%B0%97%E0%B1%81&skip_context=true

Hari

Could someone throw knowledge on me.

With 50k+ posts (by 2023 it will grow by 150k posts) i am middle of the road now. Just for search feature i don't want to migrate to discourse.

If i need to migrate i would chose wordpress over discourse.

Non Latin languages support

Search + Related posts everything is linked to same thing.

I liked the related/similar answers concept on qoura i am expecting the same feature in flarum is it possible?

Should i just be patient till flarum v2.0? (Later 2022 or early 2023)

Darkle

Hari Is there any reason why you haven't considered blomstra/search (https://discuss.flarum.org/d/30404-blomstra-search-an-elasticsearch-fulltext-search-extension)? I honestly don't have that much experience with these search related issues in Flarum (I know of its existence, but it's not something that is affecting my use cases) so I can't help you as much as I'd like to, but Elasticsearch is a very well known enterprise wide option, in fact I have some contact with that search option because I manage several Magento instances, so its performance in Flarum should be pretty good.

Hari

Darkle it's not working for non Latin languages like Telugu, Tamil, Hindi.

@clarkwinkelmann could you please go through this Hari and tell a solution

meihuak

does the develop team want to improve this function? do they have a plan?

luceos

Is the issue here that search is limited to at least three characters? Because if that's the case we could easily make that configurable, even an extension could do that.

Hari

luceos no it's is not the issue occuring because of characters limit

Hari Test links

https://flarum.it/d/296
https://flarum.it/d/297

Please go through this test links and search using the discussion title and the search will not work

luceos

If I remember correctly that was a matter of setting the database to a different scheme, but I'm not entirely sure @tankerkiller125 might remember.

hrvoje_hr

Hari If i need to migrate i would chose wordpress over discourse.

Going little off topic, but don't go on WP route. All their forum softwares/extensions are slow and sluggish. WP is great blogging software, but only that. I made that mistake by switching from SMF and it nearly killed my otherwise very active and numerous community. Luckily, Flarum saved us.

tankerkiller125

luceos If I remember correctly it would be changing the table from MyIASM to InnoDB, which can take a very, very long time on larger tables/databases and then it would also require re-indexing the fulltext search (which would also take a long time)

lichengkun135

luceos would be great to implement it as configurable

Hari

tankerkiller125 why flarum is not using innoDB by default? I mean are there any disadvantages?

Darkle

Hari Have you tried it if it works? I think it would be a good thing to document in the resources tag.

Sami (SychO)

Hari as of 1.0 new flarum installations default to InnoDB

Hari

Sami (SychO) currently flarum using InnoDB? Or flarum test environment using innoDB?

Sami (SychO)

Hari never mind actually, Flarum has used InnoDB by default for far longer than that. I just investigated our codebase and there is a bug preventing languages like Telugu from being searched, I've posted a fix here: flarum/framework3385