Following on from the previous blog post discussing the work we're doing to fix search - today we're happy to announce the full release of our fixes and improvements.
Perhaps the most important part of today's release is the fix for the bug that was causing some parcels to be dropped from the search index The fix involved replacing legacy components of the Search system which has had the added benefit of greatly improving the speed at which the Search index gets updated. In other words, changes you make will be reflected by Search much more rapidly! This new system also brings us the increased dependability and consistency we need for Search.
Index Generation
Until this week, updates could take 72-96 hours to fully propagate in Search.
This meant that new parcels and regions would take a while to show up in Search and merchants editing their search listings were not able to monitor their changes in a timely fashion. By comparison the new system updates in under 12 hours! (Plus, we plan to cut that in half in the upcoming weeks!)
Spam
Also in this release are improved methods to deal with Search spam, starting with keyword stuffing (using large numbers of words, often the same or very similar and often not related to the location itself). You should therefore notice that fewer of the top ranking results will look like they were written solely to game the rankings. Increasingly, if you add excessive numbers of keywords this may count against your ranking. Try to use fewer and more accurate keywords, including key phrases, to increase your relevance. If you would like to refresh your memory on best practices, please read our guidelines.
Improvements and Fixes List
More improvements include:
◦ Improve search listing page generation
◦ Increase crawl update speed and reliability
◦ Remove picks data
◦ Increase search index size
◦ Adjust column headers for events
◦ Exclude parcels for private sale in general search
◦ Activate arrow keys for browsing Viewer results
Bug fixes include:
◦ Results appearing with "None" text
◦ Eliminate misleading result count estimates
◦ Re-index groups missing from Search
◦ Eliminate English spelling suggestions for non-English users.
◦ Encode special characters in V2 results
More Improvements ahead
We've had reports that the current maturity filter does not prevent all adult content from being shown only to Residents who've asked for adult content. Our next projects include ensuring that the maturity filters work the way our Residents expect them to, across search results, classifieds, and events. We have also heard from people who would like to be able to browse certain types of content and restrict their search to specific collections before they search. Although we don't like the idea of showing empty Search pages to Searchers, we love the idea of having browsable collection options available to everyone who launches Search. So, we'll be designing and testing options for that, too!
Please note: that during this first release of the new system, it could take up to 48 hours for the index to be fully populated.
