Search function on private site

I'm considering Dolphin for a project that initially I was going to use Ning for. I'm glad to have since discovered Dolphin, but I'd like to know more about the one issue I had with Ning that I couldn't find a way to overcome and therefore abandoned that idea. It's was the limitation of Ning's internal site indexing and search function (it exists, but it was fairly dysfunctional). I discovered that most publicly visible Ning sites use Google search and that is of course very effective. However, for this particular site, almost all our content will be private to members, and being able to search our generated content - ideally with a variety of filters and display options - is extremely important.

I haven't found any references to this in the documentation or forums, nor do I see where there is setup for Dolphin's search function other than the google search module. It would be helpful to know if Dolphin does include it's own site indexing for the case of a private site... Or - will I need to use some sort of 3rd party app to index the site and provide the search function? It's my understanding that this is at least possible, given Dolphin is self-hosted.

I'm more the admin/designer type, and not a developer - so if someone can help me understand whether Dolphin's search function will work for me out of the box (not dependent on external search engines in other words), or whether I'll need an addon search utility, I'd appreciate it!

Still *searching* around here, trying to understand how Dolphin's search works and haven't figured it all out as yet (the search on this site seems to be a bit inadequate actually...).

Again, I'm not a developer so there's a learning curve for me. However it occurs to me to mention that what I'm aiming for is a function that will index the site - not just do a live search. Eventually this site will have a great deal of content that it will be essential to search, so indexing the site as a feature of the search function is what I'm looking for (that doesn't require external search engines that is).

When I discovered this issue with Ning, I found that there are 3rd party components that can be installed on self-hosted sites. I'm just wondering whether something like that will be necessary in this case. Any insight or advice would be appreciated!

This is just the forum and yes, the search on the forum is not the greatest.  I suggest going to the Boonex Dolphin Demo Site and play with the search there to get a feel for how it may or may not work for you.

Thanks for your reply geek_girl... I have looked at the demo with this question in mind. But what isn't clear to me, is whether the  default Dolphin search is based on google's external search engine? Given that google search is a module, I was sort of assuming that. But I also considered that there might be a search feature in addition - and that the google search module is more about SEO optimization? Hmmm...

Since I'm not sure what is generating the search results, testing the search feature on the demo doesn't entirely answer my question (I think that's what you're suggesting...?). This is the issue I ran into with Ning - I'd used the search on various Ning forums and it was extremely efficient. But I came to find out that was completely due to google's site search being integrated on those sites. 

Because the content on this site will be private (not indexed by search engines), Google site search or similar won't work. Rather I'm looking for a "internal" component that indexes the site and provides search results.

At this point I'm pretty sure that Dolphin doesn't create such an index on it's own - would that be correct? And if it does have it's own search, independent of external search engines, it's a "live" search - based on a script??

The latter would be OK to start with, but eventually I'd want to add a component that would index the site for search purposes (given the volume of content that might accumulate over time, and the importance of being able to search that content). I believe there are website components that will do this - not necessarily for Dolphin specifically, but I assume they could be integrated with the site somehow. I hope I'm making sense here - and if my assumptions are correct or otherwise, I'd appreciate the feedback!

Dolphin has different types of search:

1) Keyword search - http://demo.boonex.com/searchKeyword.php - it searches the site for entered keyword in all or selected modules. It can search for all content, even private, and displays content which is allowed for particular user only.

2) People search - http://demo.boonex.com/search.php - customized (you can change search fields via drag&drop builder in admin panel) profiles search.

3) Google search - http://demo.boonex.com/m/google_search/ - search for public and indexed by Google content.

4) Map search - http://demo.boonex.com/m/wmap/home - show public and members only content (not private) on the map.

1) and 4) can be integrated into 3rd-party module as well. 

Thanks Alex for the detailed explanation. I had more or less concluded that Dolphin's search was adequate for the time being - it's certainly better than the default in any of the alternatives I've looked at. If this site ever reaches the point where we've amassed a huge volume of content to search though, I'll look into a addon search function that will index the site. But for now, the real time search is fine. 

Keyword search can be configured:

1) to use MySQL LIKE statement - which maybe be slow for a lot of content

2) to use MySQL FULLTEXT search - which is fast for big data as well since it's indexed

Switch between the options is easy as click checkbox in Admin Panel > Settings > Advanced Settings > Disable Full-Text Search

Alex, I'd like to clarify here... In the "general" section under advanced settings, I have *unchecked* the option that says: "Disable Full-Text Search". Is that what you're referring to? In having this *enabled* - this is actually an indexed search? If that's not what you mean, can you elaborate? 

Thank you!

Hoping to get clarification on this... initially we were going to use the main forums for most of the content we would be adding (that's important to be able to search). 

However, I've now decided that discussions make more sense within the group-based forums. I wanted to test the search function on this - searching all forum content and not keywords that is. If I add a forum discussion via a group, the forum search isn't picking up words from that discussion. 

Still, given the group forums are an extension of the main forums, wouldn't the forum search still work in this case? If there the content is in fact being indexed, does this happen periodically - and therefore the search won't pick up something that I've just added? I do have the "full-text search" *enabled* (unchecked under advanced settings).

Actually - just looked at this again... I see that the drop-down box on the forum search page that lets you select specific forums does not include the group forums... that's unfortunate. Likewise, the group search function relies on keywords which isn't practical... we really need to search all the content.

I'm very confused now - and need to be sure that we can search group forum discussions before I commit to this setup...

Thanks, if you can clarify Alex!

Yes, you need to uncheck "Disable Full-Text Search" option to have indexed MySQL FULLTEXT search enabled site wide.

However, forum have different story, since it was separate product in the past, so it has some limitation in integration with other parts of Dolphin.

Regarding search:

1) site keyword search don't search in forums, there is different search form for forum:

http://demo.boonex.com/forum/?action=goto&search=1

2) there is different setting for indexed MySQL FULLTEXT search, file modules/boonex/forum/inc/header.inc.php:

$gConf['fulltext_search'] = false; // use FULLTEXT search or search using LIKE

3) Forum content in groups, events, store isn't searchable using site search nor forum search, however search page exists:

http://demo.boonex.com/forum/groups/?action=goto&search=1

but is not nicely integrated, so there is no direct link to this page, and access is forbidden by default.

Alex, thanks for answering. I was actually going to come back here today and see if I could get further assistance with this before I make a final determination as to how to configure things.

I guess I'll revisit this once again - since I spent quite a bit of time since I last posted and still couldn't figure out how to do what I'd like to do. My interest at this point is how to search full text in groups and the group forum (and the other modules ideally, but mainly groups). The main forum searches on all content without a problem. But I can't figure out how to search on anything other than keywords (i.e. tags) in groups or other modules. And that of course is using the module's own search function. 

Maybe I'm missing something still, but it seems like the full-text search applies only to the main forum.... Hmmm.  And if that's the case I'm limited to using the main forum for the bulk of our content - which is unfortunate because the groups offer so many other options.... like for privacy, although that in itself took me a couple of hours to figure out (how to create privacy groups as an administrator only option - and use that to control who can join specific groups). But if I can't search full text in group forums, then there isn't much point to that. Oh well...

If I am still missing something, maybe someone can further clarify (how to search full text in groups - the discussions particularly, but ideally files and comments as well...)

Thanks again.

I see that I had not found this search page for the group forums... It appears that the only way I'm currently able to link to this page is by putting in this url for my site. And see that access is forbidden - even as the site owner/administrator. Seems like a silly question, but how do I enable access? I don't see a menu item or page builder or... ?

This seems kind of bizarre... why wouldn't it be more integrated, and why is is disabled or otherwise hidden? If this will make it possible to search the full text in the group discussion forums, I definitely want to be able to access it...

Thanks!

You need to change the following line in modules/boonex/forum/integrations/groups/callback.php file:

'search_' => 1,

Well that was simple enough - thanks Alex. Still gotta wonder why it's hidden this way...  It would be so nice if there were a little more documentation on all the finer points of site configuration. Most of it is straightforward and intuitive, but there's a whole lot that this isn't... I've spent a lot of hours trying to figure out some things that really "should" be simple...

Thanks again.

So now that I've enabled the group forum search... I of course wanted to test it out. Initially no results for text I have entered in group forums... I would assume that indexing happens periodically (it would be helpful to know for sure how that works?).

But I also see that you can only search one group at a time. So that is not at all helpful for my purposes, and I'm back to the main forums only for discussions we need to be able to search. Which is unfortunate given the limited privacy options of the forum categories. At least, as far as I've been able to discern, private forums are relative to a membership level - I can't create user groups and set the privacy accordingly for a particular forum group or category - without giving access to all private forums. That's not helpful. I wonder if anyone has created some sort of extension that would allow more control over users and privacy for features like the forum...? I'll assume not and try to work with these limitations. 

It is automatically indexed upon content adding (it's MySQL FULLTEXT inner functionality). 

Search in groups forum feature is hidden by default because of difficulties of showing groups forum without groups. Now you can get to the forum via particular group only, the search - provides some different way, so some links/breadcrumbs maybe will not fit the site layout/logic gracefully.

It maybe that more straightforward solution is to create some 3rd-party module for your particular situation.

Also for proper functionality of FULLTEXT search some more statistics is necessary, it will not work correctly for 2-5 records. 

This is the reason it is disable by default, later when more content is available, and non-indexed search cause delays, it can be manually enabled.

Thanks Alex for the further explanations. I've not yet tried to add more content to test this, but I'll take your word for it for now.

I certainly had noticed that simply finding the group forums in the first place was not very straightforward, and I was attempting to provide some extra links and submenus to help members find them. But since we can't search all the group forums in one shot, I won't use them for this project. This is basically a not-for-profit community, so we'll probably just use the best set of features as-is.

I am however tentatively planning a couple of business projects with Dolphin - one where the group feature will be of value and the search function is less important - so this is good to know.

Thanks again.