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Can you add decent "Search" functionality to the Mozilla Support website?!

  • 6 replies
  • 3 have this problem
  • 1 view
  • Last reply by John99

JerryG0001
JerryG0001
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One of my biggest frustrations with Firefox is trying to make use of the Mozilla Support website. Almost every search I enter in the Search box yields 1000+ results. String delimiters (") to define phrases and operators like AND and OR appear not to work at all, and results seem to include ANY article that contains ANY of the words in the search box. This is next-to-useless, and I usually exhaust my patience sifting through unrelated articles, exiting the support site again with just a little less respect for Firefox/Mozilla.

One of my biggest frustrations with Firefox is trying to make use of the Mozilla Support website. Almost every search I enter in the Search box yields 1000+ results. String delimiters (") to define phrases and operators like AND and OR appear not to work at all, and results seem to include ANY article that contains ANY of the words in the search box. This is next-to-useless, and I usually exhaust my patience sifting through unrelated articles, exiting the support site again with just a little less respect for Firefox/Mozilla.

All Replies (6)

Diamond
Diamond
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Sometimes certain websites when you search in them only look what they have, not all around the world. You might want to try to search at another place.

cor-el
cor-el
  • Moderator
  • Top 10 Contributor
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It is usually best to only use specific keywords as search terms and omit using too common words that would bring up unrelated posts.

If you want to use quotes then best is to do a site search via Google (site:support.mozilla.org)

user633449
user633449
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I'm sorry you had a poor experience with our search. We are constantly working on improving it, so hopefully in the near future it will work better for you.

Was there a specific issue in Firefox you wanted to address? If there was, please let me know and I'll try to help you.

BTW, your Firefox is out of date. Try updating to Firefox 22 Update Firefox to the latest release

JerryG0001
JerryG0001 Question owner
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Thanks, cor-el. Good tip, and much better results. :-)

It seems quite sad that one can obtain more useful help for Mozilla products by searching from a DIFFERENT website (although this seems true of most vendor websites, e.g. IBM, Apple, Microsoft, Dell ....).

OldNerd
OldNerd
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Yes, specifying that the site is "support.mozilla.org" on Google's Advanced Search Page does work around the failing in Mozilla's own search.

Bookmarking

http://www.google.com/advanced_search?as_sitesearch=support.mozilla.org

is helpful for getting to the Advanced Search page on Google quickly, w/o having to do a sacrificial plain search first and w/o having to type in the site.

Thank U, JerryG000, for pointing me to cor-el's tip.

Modified by OldNerd

John99
John99
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This is a well known issue.

The search is even hardcoded into crash stats pages where it results in meaningless or misleading results.

Regulars know to use an external search engine because of this shortcoming. There are numerous instances where a string is useful the name of software or a feature for instance, but if one of the words is commonly used results max out and bury the real hits.

Compare for instance

  • Ask Toolbar (Problematic software)
    • Google I only scrolled the first 30 pages, all would appear good hits.
    • sumo maxed out 1000 results maybe two proper hits per page in the first few pages

I know I have often mentioned this. Including in the contributors forums (most recent). There are old & current bugs

  • Bug 791200 - Switch to AND search in advanced search
  • Bug 791250 - [tracker] Add way to be specific with the advanced search
  • Bug 794083 - add query_string support to advanced search

Bugs are a workplace for developers rather then a discussion forum, and so it is usual practice to discuss matters elsewhere, but anyone may register and then express an interest by voting, or add themselves to the cc list (by default just click [Save Changes] ).
N.B. email addresses used are displayed in public.