The Editors Mailbox

Search Trouble on FineWoodworking.com?

Gina Eide, Contributor

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Search on finds a lot of things... but sometimes it misses, say, an archive article even though you know should be there. Help us remedy this problem. If you run into issues with search, post a comment letting us know what's missing. We can help track down the article and make sure other woodworkers don't get frustrated in future by the same problem.

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FW editor Asa Christiana just got back from the Williamsburg conference and “Search” was one of the top complaints he heard about our site from people he ran into at the show.

So, we're hoping that you could give us a hand to help us improve the tool. Have you ever looked for an article but couldn’t find it? If so, please give us specific examples with a comment below and we work to get those articles filtered in our ranking.

We'll keep an eye on the comments on this post. As we hear about specific examples of where we’re falling short, we can go into the search administration tool and optimize the results for these specific searches... hopefully avoiding future frustration for other woodworkers.

As background, we use Google Custom Search. In general, it works pretty well. But the algorithm is pretty complicated and we’ve seen that some important articles in our archive have gotten buried or lost. But, as soon as we identify the issue, we can submit it for on-demand indexing so Goggle doesn’t miss it in future.

Note: In addition to this one-link-at-a-time fix to the problem, we'll be looking at global issues to see how we can improve the search tool as a whole.

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Comments (39)

TBC writes: Dear FWW

I can't find M.G. Rekoff's article about horizontal bore plans. It supposed to be in FWW #37 or somewhere close. Love this site!

Thanks

Tom Cray
Posted: 9:50 pm on October 16th

JohnAIA writes: I have two different complaints with searching for articles.

First, I have FWW magazine back to about issue #35, so I wanted to find an article about tuning my bandsaw. I found several and one, and in one it said to check issue #95 regarding crowning (for some unknown reason, I do not have #95) so I did a bunch of searches for bandsaw crowning and could find no articles. There is something wrong with your search engine.

The second is, why can't I access issue #95--at least the table of contents or index so I can see the exact title of the article.

Thanks,

John
Posted: 6:37 pm on September 11th

rayhobby writes: I am positive that I watched a video that would serve as a companion to the following PDF (011120054.pdf). This video is about making dovetail joints on a table saw using the jig described in issue 120.

However, I can not find the video????
Posted: 12:17 pm on February 25th

AutumnWoods writes: I want to offer a word of encouragement and thank you for addressing this issue. I've had trouble as well, finding the things I was looking for, but I'm glad you all are willing to square with this and look for solutions. One thing I remember from my subscription process is you seem to have no easy way to subscribe to both the magazine and the online content at the same time. I had to do the magazine first, then wait a few weeks to be processed and subscribe online to get the bundled rate. Might be something good to streamline a little. Best of luck!

Posted: 2:53 pm on February 19th

elizh writes: You are right, slowandeasy: I have the magazine in front of me and I can't find that spice box article online, either. If you email us at fw@taunton.com, I'm sure we can find a way to get that to you.


Posted: 4:56 pm on February 15th

Slowandeasy writes: I have searched for an article by Alex Krutsky that appeared in the September/October 1988 issue of FWW entitled Spice Boxes with no luck. I have tried searching the author's name, article title, spice boxes, and the magazine date and issue, all to no avail. I would still like to locate this article so any help would be appreciated.
Posted: 4:09 pm on February 15th

jspencer01 writes: One of the benefits of having an online subscription is having access to all of the old issues.....well that is a half truth. True, I do have access, but finding things is quite another matter. The search mechanism is so bad that finding old articles is almost impossible. My latest frustration was in my search for an article titled "Horizontal Boring Machine" written by a fellow named Rekoff. Type the title into the search field and the article is not found. Type in Rekoff and again the article is not returned. My reference to this article also specified that it was in issue 37. Look as I might, I could not find an index to issue 37 to verify that my search fields were correct.

Fine Woodworking is a great magazine, but I am finding the online membership to be less useful than originally anticipated.


Posted: 11:15 am on February 13th

GEide writes: Hokie1969: You raise a bunch of good points—I don’t have solutions to all the issues right now, but it’s good info for our team to consider. In this case, the article is not currently online. :( For articles older than about 2005, we sometimes don’t have the “departments” (e.g. Master Class, Back Covers, etc) online. I’ll check on the rights to this article. If we can republish it online, we’ll do it.

As much as possible, we try to find those references to page numbers and make sure that there is a link so you can easily find the reference online. But obviously things fall through the cracks—especially for older, archive content when we were publishing en masse.

If/when you run into issues like this don’t hesitate to contact us to let us know and we can try to remedy the situation and help you find the missing article.

You can reach us in a variety of ways: contacting customer service support (at) customerservice.taunton.com or 800-477-8727 9am-5pm ET Mon-Fri, contacting our editorial desk: fw (at) taunton.com or 800-309-8955, or emailing our web staff: fw-web (at) taunton.com.

Thanks for the feedback. -Gina

Posted: 12:11 pm on February 9th

GEide writes: tampa4wood, When I search for "Del Cover" it’s the first result: http://www.finewoodworking.com/Gallery/GalleryImage.aspx?id=5082

Though I understand this is confusing since it’s now in the gallery whereas it originally appeared on the back cover of the magazine.

Thanks for the feedback. Gina
Posted: 11:32 am on February 9th

GEide writes: Hi Beggetta,

Just catching up on this feedback here... I think you’re talking about our “list pages” where we list the various articles on different sections of the site right? Like this link http://www.finewoodworking.com/SkillsAndTechniques/SkillsAndTechniquesDirectory.aspx?dir=Dovetail+Joints or this link http://www.finewoodworking.com/Workshop/WorkshopDirectory.aspx?dir=Tablesaw+Jigs?

As I understand, this is a known bug, though I’ll make sure our developers are aware of the issue.

This quirk is frustrating for me to. My workaround is to open articles in a new browser window (right click on the mouse--> open in a new window).

When we revamp and relaunch our site, we’ll definitely correct this issue. -Gina

"baggetta writes: My complaint with the search is simple. I get a search term which show, say, 5 pages. I check the first page list. On the second page list I find an article to read. When I'm done I back off with my browser arrow which you would think returns you to the second page where I left off. No. I'm returned to the first page list."
Posted: 10:48 am on February 9th

finekiwi writes: I just saw this articale as I am just trying to find an articile in one of your magazines re workshops in vans and trucks. I have enter these woods in the search engine but I guess these words weren't used in the article. I wonder where i might find this articile. I remember people had submitted photos of their fitted out vans and trucks. So which of my 200 plus magazines is the articale in?
Posted: 5:57 pm on February 6th

saw-maid writes: The search problems don't end with the on-line search. We forked out for the archive CD this Christmas. I tried to find an article which I knew existed, but for which I didn't know the author. Guess what? It was only indexed under the author, and not under keyword or title. I found it only by accident, looking for something else. I am so disappointed. I thought I would have easy search access to all previous FW articles, but it is not so. What a waste of money!! Can FW work out the problem and issue a patch for the CDs already sold???
Posted: 2:53 pm on February 6th

woodshop1 writes: I subscribe to the magazine and "Ask the Experts" I think? I paid for ask the expert once but don't know if I'm currently paid up. No one ever advises when it's due.

Nevertheless every time I have attempted to ask a question, when I can figure out how, I'm referred to some article or the forum. When I joined I thought questions would go directly to an expert and an answer would follow. So as someone may have already stated there does not appear to be much value in the additional subscription.


Posted: 1:22 pm on February 4th

trailguy writes: Glad you are working on it. I was about to cancel online subscription because search was so bad. Maybe I missed something - but I like to sort by date of publication to see most recent articles first.

trailguy
Posted: 4:59 am on February 4th

Where'sJim writes: My complaints as both a subscriber online and to the hard copy

(1) you should be able to easily navigate complete past magazines - perhaps a separate tab indexed by issue number
(2) when doing a search with multiple articles as a result - you should see more results on a current page and when you view a selection and then hit "back" it should not take you to the beginning of the search, but the last page you were on
(3) lastly, a published date would be nice when search results are displayed

Overall - I still love both the website and magazines - great articles, full of helpful information.

Jimmy
Posted: 8:53 pm on February 3rd

GEide writes: Thanks for the feedback folks. Will review comments soon and share any immediate tips/thoughts. Otherwise, we're meeting with our tech group next week to talk about your feedback and higher-level fixes to the search issue.

Thanks, Gina
Posted: 1:02 pm on February 2nd

kilbarchen writes: I'm new here, so I have not had the opportunity to use the search engine much but I do have some experience which may apply. About 30 years ago when I was working on a graduate degree I got a grant to do some computer searching of the literature applicable to my research. A grant was needed because in those days we had to pay for the computer time (main frames) and we had to pay the owners of the various data bases we searched. I used some of my grant money to pay a librarian to design and execute my searches. Her worked saved me a lot of money.

These days we don't need to put as much thought into a search, as we can do it over until we get it right and at no cost other than our own time. However, the people who build data bases have to get them right, if they want customers to find the information they are searching for. In the case of publishers, who better to advise the data base builders than Librarians? Does FWW/Taunton employ a librarian? If not, perhaps it is time to do so, even as a consultant.

Hope that helps!
Posted: 1:36 am on February 2nd

libramento writes: In searching the FW site for articles, an important piece of information often is how current the information is. In several searches I was dismayed at not finding the date of the artcles displayed with the search results. Adding that information would make the search results much more valuable.
Posted: 10:57 pm on February 1st

BobE writes: I have every issue right back to day one. Actually, I started my subscription with issue #35 and was so pleased that I bought the five hard-cover compilations that covered all the issues from 1 - 37. Your magazine has maintained that high quality all these years, which is quite a feat.

On the old print edition index that you used to publish I never had a problem finding what I needed. The lady that used to do that indexing did a bang-up job, with one exception. While all the articles and subjects were indexed all the way back to day one, she forgot that the articles in the hard-cover compilations were in a different order. I wished she had given the page numbers for the books as well as the page numbers for the magazine. But at least if I knew what issue the article was in I could narrow it down to one book. Perhaps that is something that can now be included.

I have tried using the on-line search function and, like everyone else, find it fraught with frustrations. Unless you can remember exact names or titles it is very hard to find anything and then, as many others have mentioned, there seems to be a lot missing.

I know you are probably trying to save money by farming out this job to Google, but they are a bunch of computer geeks, not woodworkers. It just ain't working. Saving a bit of money to produce something unsatisfactory is no bargain in the long run. Perhaps you should reconsider and hire someone in-house who is familiar with the subject to do the indexing. That's just my humble opinion, but I have spent thousands of dollars with Taunton Press, so it should count for something.

Apart from this broken search feature you have first-rate publications; keep up the good work.

Bob

PS: I too, think that if you have a print subscription you should not be restricted from accessing the same material on-line. Having to pay twice comes across as just a bit greedy, which is why I have always declined the extra payment.
Posted: 7:40 pm on February 1st

Hokie1969 writes: I have come up dry on several occasions when searching a topic. For example, last night I was reading “Compound Angles Without Math” by Steve Brown. At the end of the article in a box is the invitation : “To learn how to lay out compound-angle dovetails, see Master Class on p. 96.” A search of any combinations of those words was fruitless. I guess the article is not available, but then again it could be but I am just unable to find it. I say this because even when I go directly to the tabs at the top of the site page for specific topics, be it for videos, technique articles, etc. I find possibilities listed, often none of which addresses what I am specially looking for. Then, sometime later I find a reference somewhere else - FW magazine, an email, another woodworker’s site, a blog, even a sales email for books from you… that lists a specific title of an article that was published in an old copy of the magazine, which, if that title is typed into the search box, leads me to the article that was not previous listed or found. This is not a rare occurrence. Is there anywhere on your site that lists ALL the articles that are on your site alphabetically?
Posted: 1:04 pm on February 1st

nealaron writes: My main complaint is when navigating a multiple page list of, say, techniques. If I'm on page 3 and have viewed a technique, hit the back arrow, I end up back on page one and have to find my way back to where I was. It should return me to my last point on the list.
Posted: 12:16 pm on February 1st

Recruiter writes: I think my only beef with the online version vs hard copy is, many of the references in the online version refer back to the hard copy version. An example of this is when you hit a link with the FWW icon, and it says you need to be a member to view the .pdf file. But if you look further, it will also say "From Fine Woodworking #xxx". Since I have been a subscriber for a number of years, all I need to do is pull the issue it was in. Why pay the extra for the membership, if you are going to recirculate information from previous issues. My view has always been, if you are aready subscribing to the hard copy, the online membership should be part of it, but only to the extent you were a subscriber. My meaning to this is, if you have been a subscriber (hard copy) for 2 years, you have acces to the online articles that refer to those 2 years. If you want something beyond that, you need either the membership, or pay for the articles.

Posted: 11:57 am on February 1st

tampa4wood writes: I am a subscriber to both the online and magazine, both of which are a joy to read. My issue is getting access to articles in past editions. I am searching for a copy of Del Cover's article in FW issue in 1994. All of the local libraries including the University library do not carry any archives. I have the CD with past articles and it also excludes this one. It would be a great help if you could provide all the articles in digital form. Even if we had to pay for the article, it would be a great help.

Keep up the excellent work. I look forward to receiving each addition of your magazine.
Posted: 11:41 am on February 1st

SJeret writes: I haven't read all the comments above, so it might be one already wrote about it.

I'm a subscriber of both the hard-copy and the on-line magazine.
Many times articles refer to other article published in magazine #xxx. The problem is that there is no way to search according to a magazine number, so the reference is pointless.


Posted: 10:50 am on February 1st

MikeInOhio writes: I wanted to find the article in which Roland Johnson reviews 17" and 19" Grizzly bandsaws.

PROBLEM #1 - TYPO IN ARTICLE

I searched on Grizzly model numbers that I knew had been mentioned:

G0513
G0514
G0514X
G0514X2
G0514x2B

Nothing!

The only way for search to find it is to type GO514X2B (sic)

The Grizzly model number has a zero in the second position but to get a search match I've changed the zero to a letter O.


PROBLEM #2 PARTIAL MATCHES ARE IGNORED

As an experiment, I went back and tried searching with the letter O in the model number,

I tried:

GO514
GO514X
GO514X2

Nothing!

Partial model numbers don't work. The only way to get a search hit is to type it *exactly* as it appears in the article.

GO514X2B

I hope you can fix this.



MikeInOhio


Posted: 9:48 am on February 1st

JoeW writes: While fixing links and other errors (correcting the details) will certainly make things better, it won't bring you to the level of "excellent". I think there's something wrong in the search logic being used to design your search process. If true, a total redesign might be in order. At a minimum I suggest bringing in an outsider (consultant) with excellent search expertise to guide the redesign.

The Magazine Archive DVD also suffers from a poor search process. In fact, I think it's much worse than the online magazine.
Posted: 9:24 am on February 1st

panamax writes: I lives outside the USA and am an on line magazine subscriber only.
My beef is that I cannot find the complete back issue.
Say I want to flip through the magazine that came 3 months ago, I can't do that. If I enter Issue # 215, I don't get all the articles in that issue, I get a long list of stuff that also refers to 215" or anything that has 215 in it. I can't seem to find complete back issues. I can get the advertising index for the issue, but what about ALL the articles in that issue.
Hardback subscribers have the option of taking their magazine off the shelf and flipping through it. We don't have that luxury, yet we pay the same price.
If in the future, if we cancel our subscription, we have no magazines to show our passed subscription.
It would be nice to have the complete magazine on line whereby you could flip through the pages, (just like a hardcopy), you should be able to save that whole magazine, so in the future, one can browse through it.
In the year and a half of being a subscriber, I have found the search area to be very frustrating.

Posted: 8:32 am on February 1st

baggetta writes: My complaint with the search is simple. I get a search term which show, say, 5 pages. I check the first page list. On the second page list I find an article to read. When I'm done I back off with my browser arrow which you would think returns you to the second page where I left off. No. I'm returned to the first page list. This is ok if I'm only looking at a couple of pages, but if I'm at page 10 of 30 pages when I return I'm brought back to page 1. Now I have to remember where I was and go back to the previous page. This needs fixing. You should return to the page list you were originally on.

Posted: 8:06 am on February 1st

wheel464wright writes: As a subscriber to the 'hard copy' magazine, I was a little dismayed that I had to fork out again to subscribe to gain access to the on-line members articles. (albeit a reduced charge).
As a suggestion, having struggled to find a specific article,
it seems that magazine articles could have an unique code to cross link them to the FW website?
Posted: 4:31 am on February 1st

NanooseRod writes: I should have said something before now, because I have often thought the FW search (and the one on FHB) are about the worst I have seen. I can't imagine trying to fix the situation one item at a time. There has to be a general approach that (1) eliminates duplicate results (many times it has seemed to me that almost half the entries on the first page are to same item, just described somewhat differently) and (2) lists the more important and germane items first. I would talk to the Google people, if you haven't already. Full text searches, giving priority to title, headings, author keywords, and the frequency with which a term is used in the item should work (and winnow out the duplicates). If there are problems searching the PDFs, I would talk to Adobe. I am sorry if I am saying the obvious, but the search function really has been frustrating on an otherwise very valuable website. I am glad you are taking this up as a problem.
Posted: 8:15 pm on January 31st

GEide writes: Good questions/points Steve. If you have time, as you run into search anomalies, please let us know about articles that aren’t showing up so we can learn more about these issues. Thanks for the troubleshooting assistance. -g
Posted: 9:55 am on January 24th

saschafer writes:
@Gina,

Hmmm. It's there now, but it definitely wasn't when I checked earlier, and I triple-checked it at that time. (I wonder if searching for it enough times caused the Google gerbils to finally give in?)

I understand the issues with search-engine optimization, but my experience with Google (the real one) is that if you know the exact title of a document, using that title as the search term will work essentially 100% of the time.

-Steve

Posted: 7:58 pm on January 21st

GEide writes: Hi Steve,

Glad the online index has improved (phew, one thing somewhat fixed).

RE: Dazzling inlay: I do get that article as the first result when I look via search on our site: http://www.finewoodworking.com/search/search.asp?cx=009096020989677304441%3Ayn5icbkse5w&cof=FORID%3A9&ie=UTF-8&q=%22Give+Legs+a+Kick+With+Dazzling+Inlay%22#744

Does the first result you see also take you here: http://www.finewoodworking.com/SkillsAndTechniques/SkillsAndTechniquesPDF.aspx?id=32810

The confusing thing... (and sorry, this is probably way more info than you'd ever want) is that we do update the title tags on articles because sadly, magazine titles are not always very good for Search Engine Optimization. No one besides a FW reader whow saw the article would think to use the words "dazzing" and "kick" when searching via google for an inlay article. To help those people we did add terms saying "How to Add Decorative Inlay to Furniture Legs."

Unfortunately, this hack to improve SEO, makes it more difficult for magazine readers to find what they're looking for.

But, the bottom line is that I hear your concerns and know we should do better. These examples, however are very helpful to better understand the issues involved.

Your suggestion about abstracts too is a good one too.

I'll bring these things up with our team to see if there are any short term fixes.
Posted: 6:09 pm on January 21st

saschafer writes:
The true irony of the situation is revealed when I go to google.com and try the "Give Legs a Kick With Dazzling Inlay" search there, and the article in question comes up as the first hit...

-Steve

Posted: 5:29 pm on January 21st

saschafer writes:
My formerly biggest beef was that the online magazine index was utterly abysmal. The good news is that you fixed that, and it works much better now. Thank you.

My current biggest beef is that things that obviously ought to be linked are not. Example: I seem to remember that Garrett Hack recently wrote an article on inlay, and I'd like to take another look at it. So I go to the online index, type in "Hack" and scan through the results. Aha! There it is (I think): "Give Legs a Kick With Dazzling Inlay"

Now, I can walk over to my bookcase and see if that is indeed the article I want, but it's undoubtedly available online, too, right? Surely there's a direct hyperlink from the magazine index entry to the online version, right? Right?

No, of course not. So I use the Google site search, using the full title of the article as my search term. I get a half-dozen hits, but amazingly enough, NONE of them are links to the article of interest! How can that be? I finally do find the article, a link to which is buried in one of the More... links at the bottom of another article on inlay.

An additional observation: Most (all?) online versions of articles include an "abstract" that really, really ought to be immediately accessible from the index search results, preferably in-line with each search result, in the form of an expand/collapse block. That way, if you get a lot of search results, you can quickly browse the abstracts to get a better idea whether or not the article is in fact what you're looking for, before you spend time fetching the article itself (either electronically or via sneakernet).

-Steve

Posted: 5:24 pm on January 21st

GEide writes: Hi Buche,

Yes, I agree it’s frustrating that our blog and gallery posts come up so highly in search, yet some of our highest-quality content (our 30 year-archive of expert-written woodworking articles!) gets buried. Our tech people tell me this is something we should be able to improve a bit given our current tools with Google custom search.

In the interim however, if there are specific instances where we can improve things, let me know. RE: The Hack article: It comes in number one now if you just type in “huntboard.” But I’ll see if we can improve its rankings for ‘Garrett Hack Huntboard’ since I’m sure that’s how many may search for that article.

Your suggestion about the index is good. I wish there was a way we could blend (and improve upon) our index of magazine articles: http://www.finewoodworking.com/pages/fw_articleindex.asp and our online search tool which includes links to actual copies of archive articles. Your suggestion about improving it with images would also be good. This type of upgrade would be time consuming but I’ll definitely bring it up with our team.

Thanks for the feedback, Gina
Posted: 4:59 pm on January 21st

GEide writes: Good point Reuban. I’m not an expert on this (though will forward your concern to someone who is), but let me take a stab at your questions...

Here are details on finding your account number on a physical copy of the magazine: https://www.taunton.com/eCommerce/CS/cs_acctfind_popup.asp
You can also find it online via this form: https://reg.taunton.com/account/customerservice/custfind.html?ig=default

But, you make a good point in that the FW search tool is separate from our customer service tool that holds customer account info (a link to the Customer Service info at the bottom of every page on our site)
http://mycusthelp.net/taunton/_cs/FindAnswers.aspx?sSessionID=7489146236FHRODSLQYPCSQT[BDODOFLWKRQMACC&lstFilter_a=-1

Does this help you with your question? I will find out if there is a way that general FW search could search the customer service FAQ database as well since you raise a good point that people seraching on FW aren’t only looking for articles, they coudl be looking for customer service type info.

For reference though, you can always contact our CS people via email support@customerservice.taunton.com or Phone: 800-477-8727 9am-5pm ET Mon-Fri. They’re real people here in Newtown, CT and they’re very helpful!
Posted: 4:06 pm on January 21st

Buche writes: The biggest problem I have is that article hits and hits for the readers gallery get all mixed up. If I am looking for, say, Garrett Hack's article about his Huntboard, the most and first hits are for pieces in the readers gallery.

On a somewhat different note, I wish there was an online index of the magazine (with title pictures). For example, if I remember an article in the past 6 months but can't rememebr who wrote it, I can't just browse the back issues by clicking on the cover pages. that is only possible for the current issue. why not expand that feature?
Posted: 3:21 pm on January 21st

Rueban1 writes: I was searching for my account number to find out when my subscription expired. The site would not respond to the search request and I even had trouble finding out where to ask. Customer service finally gave me the subscription answer but I still cannot find my account number. I will find out when the next issue arrives. Can't wait!
Posted: 10:25 pm on January 20th

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