Ideas
inefficient repeated advanced search solutions?
Anyone else have this problem? We have writers that use the public-facing site to look up story references. Consequently they're interested in a date-ordered search result, from recent to older, not the default 'relevance' search. They have to use advanced search, which newly includes a date range with calendar controls to pick the dates that default to today's date. This works OK for the one-off search, but for those who make a dozen such searches a week, they have to repeatedly set the starting date range, which is repetitive, time-consuming and frustrating.
What might answer this problem is if all users could set a default search order, or barring that, a default search window.
On top of that, if you're logged into our site with access to more than one of our publications, results from all available publications are included. It'd be nice to get search results from one chosen publication.
I think this may be an issue for some readers who search frequently as well. Any one else bugged by this?
Customer support service by UserEcho
Yes, I've been meaning to report the "default to today's date" annoyance. I had a reporter complain last week. If nothing else those should default to empty.
I think it used to be that we could type in "30 days ago" in the search (what we call a relative search) and that would work. But, we had to change our datepicker and it seems we can't type relative dates in there anymore. I will see if this is something that can be changed.
However, I wonder if this will help in the meantime... you can still use relative dates in the search parameters:
https://www.flex-showcase.bloxcms.com/search/?d1=30%20days%20ago&d2=today&sd=desc&l=10&t=*&nsa=eedition
d1 is the earliest part of the date... where you can type in "30 days ago" or "yesterday" or whatever
d2 is the end of the search window, which can be "today" or "yesterday" etc.
One thing we’ve found to be helpful is using RSS to search. You can use something like Google Sheets and =IMPORTFEED. Here’s an example: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1OH2VXeoIDS3iRTYkQEMNLYmB9227GI6ZLbhAKuLVM1Y/edit
You can keep a running list of frequently used queries on sheet 2 and just copy+paste into the top cell on sheet 1. (Yes, there are definitely cleaner ways to do it.)
Not an exact answer to your question but it can make sifting through searches a bit cleaner.
Bonus shortcut to write the queries: just search on your BLOX site, then copy the URL and replace “&f=html” with “&f=rss”