Dpreview launches redesigned and improved on-site search (beta)

The new engine apparently does not even support the simplest of Boolean logic like AND OR NOT or quotes, how pathetic.

The content of DPR articles cannot be copied and pasted without including the black background which uses up lots of ink. Various website updates have not corrected this oft suggestion of mine so DPRs intent must to be to copy write this user hostile feature.

The new "improved" search engine is terrible. It offers way fewer options to drill down to the actual data you need. The results are less accurate and forces one to spend way more time sifting through useless chaff. Perhaps, this is what dpr wants.

It does appear to be designed to try and point you to the pages that dpr wants you to visit. Good job there. DPR use to be far and away the best manged forum that of which I had the pleasure to be a member. Since the acquisition by Amazon, I have watched the dpr devolve further & further as the site focused on bell & whistles as opposed to content. Your users are not toddlers looking to be spoon fed. We can get that from the manufactures' websites.

Please bring back the old engine, at least as an advanced options. While you are at it add an option to limit searches to our own posts. Now that would be handy.

Sincerely

I'm using Firefox v.12, and everything works OK - thanks! This is big improvement.
For practicality, I'd suggest the redesign of the top line like this:
... Lenses Printers Forums Photos Challenges Search
Rolldown under Photos should contain Galleries-relevant links as before, and rolldown under Challenges should have Challenge-related group, previously located under Photos. Search would open the new search page.
It would be practical and visually more pleasing.
As to the page background... I don't mind reading off the black. I just zoom-in a bit and it's perfectly readable. But a choice of backgrounds would be a treat, especially for people who find it a problem.
The most practical solution would be an elegant, thin white->grey->black slider option somewhere, say, below the username blue field, or a set of "skins" - whatever is easier to do.
Picture-viewing should, IMO, stay with the black background, although many think that "Kodak grey" (60% black) allows the best viewing...

In a perfect world, a simple click at the far right corner will turn black background with white letters into a white background with black letters and viceversa without compromissing the page size. Very much like any site will flip from, lets say, Japanese to English or Dutch. And while at it, it will be so nice to include in the Photo Challenge section a search for challenges past by simply typing a word, lets say 'red', and you get a list of title Challenges past with this word in it. :D please?

I use FireFox and for a long time now I cannot click into the "search" field. Won't let me in. My java is up to date. I also cannot sign into these news comment section ( using IE for this right now), nor can I vote in challenges. Try to fix these items for Firefox users?

Please, if you redesign the page, change the black background of the page, after 2 minutes of reading the text on your page, I have already really serious problems with my eyes, I need to stop to read...
This is the reason why I still less and less visit your page, because I have fears that I will read something a little bit longer and my eyes are are in pain...
White text on the black background is hell!

This was waste of resources... And people who did the programing know it.
I hope DPReview has put in a request for resources for a complete site overhaul to bringbit into sync with the rest of the internet.

It is embarrising that the only effective way to search this site is to go on Google and type: dpreview "thing you want to find"

Well done. Searching for "K-5" actually gets you Pentax K-5 and not Canon 5D.

Like a lot of search engines it seems to have problems distinguishing short search terms that aren't actual words. For example, searching for Canon 40D (no quotes) gives all sorts of irrelevant results that happen to contain the number 40 and the letter "D". Using quotes returns more useful results, but still pulls in lots of other "canon" stuff. Since most cameras have short, arbitrary combinations of letters and numbers as names, this can be a problem.

First impressions:
A search for "Time Lapse" vs "Iimelapse" gives different results.
Also, these searches give me in excess of 16000 results which is not very useful and I don't see anyway of further filtering the results.
I do not know the search engine you are using, but this is the main flaw with full text search engines against large databases like DPreview - you get HUGE numbers of results and no way of filtering.

I've seen results from a search engine called Exalead, which built a keyword summary "on the fly" from the initial search results. In other words, it reported that in the result, "X" items contained the keyword YYYYYY and "Z" results contained the keyword BBBBBB. Each of these keywords was a link allowing you to drill down deeper and deeper. Pretty cool way of finding stuff.

The new beta may be able to find lots of items quickly and perhaps even more accurately, but if a search returns tens of thousands of hits, it's not very useful.

Constructive feedback? Rather than re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic why not focus development efforts in more practical areas? The user interface is not as intuitive as it could be. What once worked years ago and through "feature-creep" this site has become somewhat daunting for a new user to navigate. Stabilize... the back end appears to crash and have to reset on a somewhat regular basis.

Just an honest non-emotional opinion.

If you really want to improve your web site, why not render it with black type on a white background (or similar variation) to tat it can be read without strain. Your emphasis on graphics trumps visual comfort. I routinely use "Readability" to avoid eyestrain at dpr.

You guys sure complain a lot.

I too hate the new search -- the old one lacked a lot of parameters but I always managed to pinpoint exactly what I was searching for -- no longer.

It seems that the more effort put into improving (I use the term loosely) DPR forum the less intuitive it gets.

It's like Coca Cola trying to replace original Coke with a funny tasting raspberry version.

hope it is more evolved than the last search engine founded on the site ...

Where is it? I cannot find a link to the beta site

Thanks guys but how about a decent mobile web interface, if you see how it appears on a smartphone you might simply disable it!

i just had a quick zoom around it, think it's a big improvment, looks good, thanks.

Hm, I think that the search could still be improved. For example, I searched for "Nikon 17-55" without the quotes and the highest search terms were both from Canon blogs /and/ forum posts.

Still, an improvement, I would say at a first look.