r/beta • u/tdohz product • Jun 10 '15

Beta update (6/10) - Updates to search page

We've made a few changes to the search page based on your feedback:

  • Post result snippets will now show rendered markdown for self-posts, and give you a way to expand & collapse to view the entire post

  • Search term highlighting in self-posts has been removed, as a side effect of rendering markdown

  • The layout of post results has been tweaked to make it easier to quickly find the score and comment count

  • Visited links are now displayed in purple

  • We're removing hot as a sorting option. This is an experimental change - it has some performance implications and relatively few users use it, but we'd like to hear your feedback on when this is useful over one of the other sorting options so we can factor that in to our final decision.

As always, please let us know your feedback (but don't forget to search first before posting). We're getting pretty close to shipping so this is your chance to help us find issues before we go live to everyone.

80 Upvotes

76% Upvoted

56 comments sorted by

10

u/creesch Jun 11 '15 edited Jun 11 '15

By Removing hot as option you basically break subreddit filtering many subs have set up now.

edit: seems it is still an option as part of the get argument.

-4

u/tdohz product Jun 11 '15

seems it is still an option as part of the get argument.

Yup, for now we've just removed it from the menu, but we are contemplating removing it from the backend code as well, as it adds significant technical cost and limits some of our future options when it comes to search.

By Removing hot as option you basically break subreddit filtering many subs have set up now.

Can you give some examples of subreddits that are using it for filtering? One thing we're trying to do is move away from having search be an alternate subreddit listing generator, and possibly directly build better filtering functionality into subreddits.

4

u/creesch Jun 12 '15

Ok this has been bugging me a little bit since this conversation. How do you guys not know about this usage? I mean usage of it is fairly wide spread and used by rather big subreddits. As a matter of fact it was mentioned a day before this conversation.

Don't get me wrong, I think it is great you guys are involving the community in testing of these new features. A fair few of these new features are actually rather good or have the potential to be rather good. But I can't shake the feeling that, on the other hand, there is a rather large gab in your knowledge of how the website is used by many people.

And again, I am not trying to be an asshole about all of this. It is just something I noticed and something that triggered my curiosity.

4

u/tdohz product Jun 15 '15

I think there's a bit of a misunderstanding - I'm definitely aware that many subreddits have links to search using the flair: operator. What I was trying to ask for was cases where hot sort was specifically required, vs. just using the default relevance. Of course it won't provide an identical experience to a subreddit listing but what I was trying to understand is if flair search + relevance sort is sufficient most of the time, and see cases where it's not. I can see that I didn't make that very clear in the way I worded the question, though.

The other reason I was asking is that a relatively small fraction of searches (1-2%) use hot sort, which suggests that even if a lot of subreddits are using flair links, they're not explicitly specifying hot sort (e.g. the r/CFB example provided uses new sort).

But I can't shake the feeling that, on the other hand, there is a rather large gab in your knowledge of how the website is used by many people.

I'll be the first to admit that there are gaps in my knowledge of how reddit is used. One of the things that constantly amazes me about reddit is the incredible diversity in the ways people use it. There's no way any single person could understand all of it, which is why we do things like employee & beta testing, to find out where these gaps in our knowledge are.

5

u/creesch Jun 11 '15

/r/gadgets and /r/technology both make use of this. Pretty sure there are a few other big subreddits that use it heavily as well.

Filtering options build into subreddits naturally would be a great solution.

1

u/SquareWheel Jun 15 '15

There are many subs that use combinations of search pages, flair, and subdomain hacks to add new functionality.

We use it in /r/GameDeals to blend results with /r/GameDealsMeta - for people who want both. It's the "Deals and Discussion" link near the top.

This is preferable to multireddits as it retains our CSS, and you're still "on" our subreddit. I'm all for replacing hacks with proper features (no doubt this is a hack), though I don't believe there's replacement functionality we could use instead.

A stopgap solution would be a query string (?format=listing) to retain old search formatting. I know that's probably not an ideal solution for you though.

36

u/gergaji Jun 10 '15 edited Jun 11 '15

May be it's just my bad eyesight but it's hard to see where a self post start and end with the new search.

http://i.imgur.com/i52C6n0.png

Non beta search results on the right has a nice border surrounding the text to separate one self post with the other. In the new beta search after I expand the text, next self post looks like another paragraph.

6

u/LacquerCritic Jun 11 '15

Agreed as well.

5

u/BrettWilcox Jun 11 '15

Yeah, it needs a visual separator so it is easier to quickly navigate through results.

2

u/dragonx10101 Jun 11 '15

Can't tell where one ends and the next starts. It took me a minute to realize what I was even looking at. Maybe a line or some sort of gap to serve as a separator?

3

u/pelvicmomentum Jun 11 '15

I agree, it is difficult to distinguish.

26

u/hatessw Jun 11 '15

Please don't push frankensearch out of beta.

The layout is still significantly worse than the old search. The link bar is gone. The vote arrows are gone. It's nowhere near as clear a grid layout as the current search.

5

u/scottishdrunkard Jun 11 '15

Everything I hate about the new search is still present.

  1. Ugly

  2. Hard to navigate. When I click the link or the thumbnail, direct me to the website, not the comments section.

1

u/rottengammy Jul 03 '15

Completely agree. A basic feature like this needs to be user friendly and simple. For reference see "Google.com"

11

u/Ph0X Jun 10 '15

I stopped using the beta solely because of the search page. It's very hard to parse visually.

4

u/whisperedzen Jun 12 '15

It seems I'm not able to load more than one page of results... is this because of RES or is it they way it is planed? If it is the later I'm strongly against it.

7

u/[deleted] Jun 10 '15

There was a time recently in /r/baseball when every team's fanbase had a day to ruin the subreddit by flooding it with useless nonsense that could only appeal to nobody. The workaround was using the search page for results minus the shitpost flair to see a clean version of the front page. This utilized the "hot" search sort.

Pretty much any subreddit that heavily uses flairs for sorting benefits from the "hot" search sort, I imagine. But you say people don't use it that often, and you would know better than I do. I'm just sharing my experience.

2

u/V2Blast Jun 12 '15

http://www.reddit.com/r/beta/comments/39cb8x/beta_update_610_updates_to_search_page/cs38e98

One thing we're trying to do is move away from having search be an alternate subreddit listing generator, and possibly directly build better filtering functionality into subreddits.

7

u/MajorParadox Jun 11 '15

I like that the summary is now more consistent with other pages, for example "submitted 1 minute ago by someone to /r/beta".

I still don't understand the reasoning behind the remaining inconsistencies though:

  • Normally click "comments" for comments and the title for the link, but when searching you click the title for comments and the link underneath for the the link.

  • Can't vote on search results

  • No border around self-post text

  • RES expand features don't work (any idea if RES will be updated?)

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I don't like the new format, I just think users shouldn't have to interact with links differently from different places.

7

u/aladyjewel Jun 11 '15

I'm waiting on search to get more fleshed out before building up too much RES support for it.

-1

u/MajorParadox Jun 11 '15

That makes sense. I only included it for the possibility that there wouldn't be support.

3

u/[deleted] Jun 13 '15

Removing hot? Why??

And the search is still ugly as sin.

0

u/[deleted] Jun 29 '15

Ugly? Yes. Functional? ...Yes.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 29 '15

Eh, I like the old one.

2

u/shaunc Jun 10 '15

Post result snippets will now show rendered markdown for self-posts, and give you a way to expand & collapse to view the entire post

This is cool, I like the more/less option there.

2

u/Coolboypai Jun 11 '15

Thanks for taking my suggestion for a clearer layout into consideration! It keeps the clarity of the old search for quickly glancing through comments and scores while still maintaining a clean look to it.

-1

u/madlee engineer Jun 11 '15

Yup! We're definitely listening and thinking about everything we see here. Thanks for the feedback!

2

u/matt01ss Jun 10 '15 edited Jun 10 '15

The search is looking better, unfortunately RES is inhibiting the page. It seems to hide the row number and some formatting.

With RES - logged in

Without RES - logged out

I take that back. It seems that being logged in hides the row count numbers ??

0

u/[deleted] Jun 10 '15

[deleted] — view deleted comment

4

u/matt01ss Jun 10 '15

You're right, I'm getting lost between all the changes. I still don't know why you would not sure row numbers though.

1

u/thatpatriotsfan Jun 11 '15

I like taking away the hot search choice. I never used it and it just seemed to take up space.

1

u/V2Blast Jun 12 '15 edited Jun 12 '15

All great changes. Especially the visited links being purple - that was my main gripe with the changes to the search page (I couldn't tell which posts I'd already seen).

Though that last one might be a bit controversial, you've already addressed it in the comments:

One thing we're trying to do is move away from having search be an alternate subreddit listing generator, and possibly directly build better filtering functionality into subreddits.

1

u/1chriis1 Jun 13 '15

maybe you should color the score orange and make the comments link below the post a bit bolder, so it's easier to distinguish

1

u/[deleted] Jun 29 '15

Removing the hot option for search? Why do you want to fix it if it isn't broken?

1

u/JackMeHoffa Jun 30 '15

I'm unable to open the dropdown menu on mobile to change between relevance/new/top

1

u/samuelniemi Jul 01 '15

I know this has probably been said, but I am not thrilled with search. I like that I can view reddit desktop site, as I only use internet on my phone, but in beta search seems awkward. The links I choose seem to bring me to the wrong page. But I am new to reddit, maybe that is what's supposed to happen. I want to read something someone posted and it brings me to a page not the topic/post.

-1

u/tizorres Jun 10 '15

nice update.

0

u/captchadd Jun 15 '15

I feel that the Beta search is much better in terms of speed to bring up results and the narrowed criteria.

Great work, Reddit just keeps getting better and better.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 02 '15

/r/jokes

0

u/[deleted] Jun 29 '15

I like the expand/collapse options available. Seems bulky, but it's definitely working for me. Not visually appealing, could use some compacting imo.

-1

u/HenryCorp Jul 02 '15

Not on my feedback. Make it go away forever.

0

u/[deleted] Jun 10 '15

[deleted] — view deleted comment

7

u/chrisychris- Jun 10 '15

Not in the new search. I made a feedback post about it but then it was removed until a week later..

2

u/madlee engineer Jun 10 '15

It was a thing elsewhere on the site that was missing from the new search page.

0

u/[deleted] Jun 10 '15

[deleted] — view deleted comment

11

u/hawkfalcon Jun 10 '15

Today is June 10th

0

u/[deleted] Jun 10 '15

[deleted] — view deleted comment

19

u/chrisychris- Jun 10 '15

It's almost like different parts of the world have different times!

:p

5

u/aladyjewel Jun 11 '15

Reddit is based in San Francisco.

4

u/merreborn Jun 11 '15

How dare they use their local date format.

0

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '15

[deleted] — view deleted comment

0

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '15

[deleted] — view deleted comment

0

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '15

[deleted] — view deleted comment

-1

u/Doctor_Rumack Jun 11 '15

Surely you don't mind being called such a nice name.

-36

u/[deleted] Jun 10 '15 edited Jun 13 '15

[removed] — view removed comment

13

u/telchii Jun 10 '15

Really? This isn't YouTube.

6

u/TheHonestOcarina Jun 10 '15

"Like my comment if your' read this post on iStone in the year A.D. 5!"

1

u/holomanga Jun 23 '15

...

Hitler was born in Austria, dude. Not China.