Search your own content : cohost support

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Jake Eakle

started a topic about 2 years ago

As discussed here, search is absolutely vital to me for the long-term usefulness of a social website. Part of what makes tweeting particularly compelling to me is that their excellent search means that I can feel confident that I'm adding to an easily-accessed personal archive of things I care about.

I understand that there are some concerns around searching more broadly, but full-text search (and ideally advanced search operators for date ranges, media attachments, exact string matching, and shares) for one's own archive seems uncontroversial.

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m k

said about 1 year ago

Sorry, I know this is an old thread, but I have to chime in with my support. I joined cohost a few days ago, and I love the vibes, but I'm already starting to feel the same apprehension reposting things here as I did when I used Twitter. On Tumblr, when you reblog things, you tag them and then can search your own blog for this tag, showing you a curated selection of "art" or "zelda" posts, for example, that does not necessitate going through the entire tag for the entire website; you used to even be able to differentiate between searching for terms or tags by simply adding "/search/art/ or "tagged/art" to your URL. It was amazing, and it allowed for more or less precise searching *a specific blog* based on what you were looking for. But on Twitter, you don't tag things when you retweet, so searching your own blog for that curated feed was difficult if not impossible, and it made me not ever want to retweet anything given I'd never find it again. Cohost is somewhere in between these two, but you ultimately still have tagged posts on your blog, and I feel remiss to not have a search feature to be able to parse them. I think I understand the apprehension to not term search on a site-wide scale ... and other discussions in other threads about some solutions to that are interesting, from what I've seen ... but I just feel like searching your own blog is non-negotiable, term- or tag-based. Being able to do it to other blogs would be great for the same reason ( "I like this person's taste in X Y Z!" ), but again, I understand why doing that sort of thing is up for debate, at the moment.

J

Jake Eakle

said about 1 year ago

You already can list posts on a particular page with a particular tag, e.g. https://cohost.org/jseakle/tagged/crossword, so I think for your use-case you're all set.

The existing functionality is certainly useful, but I wouldn't call it "searching". This feature request is about adding full-text search to posts you have made, which is important because you don't always remember to tag things, and you don't always remember what you tagged things when you do, and sometimes you're not looking for a particular thing at all, you just want to find out how many times you've used a particular phrasing, or whatever. Thankfully, the feature has been marked as planned! :)

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m k

said about 1 year ago

Oh wow, yep, that's essentially what I was hoping for hahah. I suppose I should have snooped around a little more to figure that out, but I appreciate you letting me know! Thank you!

Testing it shows that you need to add on your own tags to a post in order to search your own blog -- which is fine and makes sense, of course, but it's a bit confusing when you repost something & it carries over every single tag the OP used ... it was unclear to me whether those served a purpose once the post is on your blog or not. Now I know!

Very happy to hear the search functionality is getting expanded, though. I'd also greatly appreciate being able to research phrases or tags or what have you's! Hopefully it isn't a terrible hassle to implement.

( I initially asked this question on mobile, so I apologize ... I maybe missed the "planned" button up at the top of the post.

GameMasterofScratch

said about 1 year ago

Absolutely want this feature to be implemented into CoHost! It is a boon for both the followers and the creator, and helps old posts get circulated more!