Help Make Search Return Full Posts

Is it possible to make the search feature return entire posts instead of 100 character or so short versions of them?

Reason: It can get tedious opening 30 tabs to see if the posts contain anything worthwhile. Especially when searching for all posts by a particular member. It would be much easier to Ctrl+F on the search page than to Ctrl+F on individual tabs for each post.

 

Wouldn't it also make it harder to find specific posts in the section you're searching in though? You would have to search through more pages to find the one you're looking for. If you're looking for a post by a certain member, there's an option for that already, so I really don't see why there would be a need to return full posts rather than how it currently is.

 

I'm not sure what you think I mean but I'm pretty sure you got mixed up.

The search results would be the same, but instead of only showing the first 100 or so characters of the posts, it would show the entire post in each result. The number of results on each page wouldn't change.

 

@.Hades, he's talking about this:



Using this thread, for example, he'd also like to see this:

 

As far as I'm aware it's not possible (and confirmed by a quick search on the XF forums). The idea behind returning snippets of posts is to make it easier to browse through results (imagine if ten huuuuge posts were returned on one page). That said, we are due up for an update to our search engine that will make some changes to the results returned. Presently, if I search, say, "Sora," I would get every post that includes the word "Sora," beginning with the most recent. With the update we'll be able to use relevancy sorting, so that may give you more accurate search results at least.

 

Hmmm... I'm sure there's a way to do it but it's probably not easy. Ah well.

Side note: If large results are an issue then you could have a maximum height and only display the full posts on click or something to that effect.

 

Like with long quotes?

 

Yes, exactly.

 

I created a client-side script to expand snippets to full posts until a verdict can be reached about official implementation.