sticky search

[chrisgreaves]

"nice to have item" #3,278

A sticky search. I've just realised why some of my searches take ages - the search mechanism shifts from my chosen forum to All Forums. Here's an example:
<pre>Jump to Word forum
Choose Search.
"sort paragraphs by style" without the quotes
Submit (15 hits)
Search
(reverts to All Forums)</pre>

At this point, if I haven't noticed the switch to All Forums, I'll type in a different search string, click Submit, but this time I'll be canvassing the entire database.

[HansV]

You can use the Back key of your browser instead of clicking Search the second time.

I think the reason that you revert to All Forums if you click Search from a Search Results page is that Search Results can contain posts from multiple forums. It would be a lot of extra work to check whether all search results are from one forum to determine what should be displayed in 'Forum or Category to search'.

[chrisgreaves]

> lot of extra work to check whether all search results are from one forum

Ttrue. My point about "sticky" being that if the mechanism took the care to remember that I'd specifically chosen to search in the Word forum, it could restrict itself to that forum until such time as I elected to change the forum. There's no need to do any work other than remember my forum setting from one pane to the next. It doesn't seem to be that much work to say "Let's stay where the user put us".

I think that if you try it, you'll see that if you start off with a mental set of saying "I need to look in the Word forum", it is quite pointless for the search mechanism to say "You may have chosen Word initially, but I'm going to broaden (and lengthen) your search anyway .....".

[HansV]

I see your point, but I fear that <img src=/S/claude.gif border=0 alt=claude width=21 height=21> simply doesn't have time to modify the code behind the Search function.

[chrisgreaves]

Right. I hope that these inadvertent global searches don't bog the lounge down too badly.

[Francois]

I don't know if you have Proxomitron installed on your pc, but if so have a look at <post#=419749>post 419749</post#>