Searching For Mods on MMH

[Spirithawke]

Archiving this announcement I made on the MMH front page to keep it accessible to people:

Fliggerty has put a lot of effort into the search algorithms. I would like to take a moment and share a few tips for searching for mods on MMH.  MMH has two types of search. It has a general search that you see and use up at the top right of the screen where you just type in your search term(s) and hit that search button right next to the entry box.  It also has an advanced search page that you can use by clicking on that second search button (top middle of page).

The advanced search can be very useful for performing targeted (specific) searches. You can limit the search to only look at the title of a mod, the description of a mod, the author of a mod, the file name of a mod, or any combination of those things by using those checkboxes. You can also choose the type of search performed. The default selected will be Match Any (give results that match any of the search terms), but you can also choose to make it do an Exact Match (Note from Fliggerty: "The exact match isn't exactly exact...it is a weighted thing; so towards the end it may not be entirely exact. There is a threshold set".  What this means: If you do an author search on Lady Rae and choose Exact Match for the type of search, you will get all of the Lady Rae results at the top of the list and things like Lady E as results further down in the results list.) or a Boolean Search (using the words AND, OR, NOT, or their symbols & | - between your search terms to make the search more specific) using your search terms.

A couple other tips:
You can use wildcards with your search terms (the * symbol). For example, let us say you want to do a title search of all mods that have the word gold as part of the mod title. You could type in *gold* and get results such as mods with Golden, Goldi, SODGOLD, and HendalfGold in their titles instead of just the word gold in the title.

Sometimes it can be useful to perform specific searches using part of a mod name instead of the whole mod name just to see what else you get back as results.  For example, instead of searching for Morrowind Patch Project, you could search for Morrowind Patch in a title search and get results such as Unofficial Morrowind Patch v1.6.3b in your search results.  Also keep in mind that sometimes it may be beneficial to search on things using the common acronym for a mod as some people release their addons and patches using those acronyms. For example, if you do a title search using MCA you get quite a few results of mods meant to be used with Morrowind Comes Alive.

Additional Note From Fliggerty: "Any search using three letters or less as a lone search term uses a wildcard automatically, and anything with 0 results on the first pass does as well."

Edit:  Something I forgot to mention in the past: If your search term would use a hyphen in it, it tends to be better to not use the hyphen and replace it with a blank space instead.

[Leonardo]

I tried to find another thread to post my question about a mod version I'm looking for, but I guess this thread is better for my question.

I decided to try BUUL in my current game after I read this post, but how do I know if I found the latest version or not in a search rather to look inside of a mod entry.  

[Logitech]

search engine does not seem to work at all right now. Even typing "better" does not lead to any results. The site also have some kind of google blocking "feature" that prevents using google serach as an alternative. I think it has always been an awful idea that google never lead to MMH (google is my first place to search for morrowind mods after Yacoby site went offline, and I don't think I'm the only one), and now with the broken MMH search engine, the site is unusable.

[Drakkmore]

We are aware that the search id down on MMH, but the only people that can do anything about it are all MIA currently. With any luck one of them will be around soon so that the issue can be corrected. I do agree that it is a bad idea that it is a bad thing that google can not lead here, but I am not the one that can do anything about that either. Please be patient with us. it will get fixed eventually.

[Logitech]

Thank you for the information, Drakkmore. I really appreciate the effort behind MMH.

[gramblosh]

search engine does not seem to work at all right now. Even typing "better" does not lead to any results. The site also have some kind of google blocking "feature" that prevents using google serach as an alternative.

You can search MMH with google at least partially, see follow this link
https://www.google.com/search?q=texture+site%3Amw.modhistory.com
it skips a few results as similar cause robots.txt forbids indexing of the sites, so for google they are all the same which does not mean that google doesn't know they exist. When you tell google to show those skipped results you can use it pretty well, as long as you know at least the title of the mod. That is not perfect but more than nothing.

[Drakkmore]

There is also sorting through the mods in a specific category if you have an idea of what category the mod you want should be in. I know it is a long process, bit hey you might come across something you never knew you wanted till you saw it

[Leonardo]

It would be convenient if we could search for a broken PES link in this post especially when the poster cannot provide more information about the mod in question.

[Leonardo]

Search Fail!!!


Someone wanted to find Original Faces by AHRIZ.  So I search for it with the keyword "AHRIZ", but the result was blank.  However, when I search for "Faces" then this mod came up.

Why does the search failed for author in caps, but not with the keyword "Faces".  Are the reason for using caps for the author or have I miss something here?  

[Drakkmore]

Donno Leo might be an issue with the search scripts. I'll go ahead, and initialize them and see if that helps.



EDIT: I restarted the search scripts, and there was still no result to the search. I also tried with just the "A" capitalized, and with all lower case letters, both with no results.
I will get a hold of Fliggerty,a nd see if he might have something he can do about it.

[mikestuart]

nice information Drakkmore!

[Crazy Greggy]

Drakkmore, I was wondering if there's a current list of mods still missing from MMH. I know there was once but not sure if anyones updated it or where to find it. Cheers.

[Drakkmore]

Sorry to say, that no there is not a current list, Our Senior Curator went walkabout on us last summer, and has never been back. Sadly he was the one with the list, and I have no idea what he did with it, or where it can be found to be updated. I certainly hope that he does find his way back here though because he is sorely missed around here.

[Crazy Greggy]

Agreed: his departure has left a hole. Here's hoping he finds his way back. His presence is missed indeed. I guess we'll muddle through in the mean time. Ta for the reply and hope you're well. Cheers, CG.

[Spirithawke]

Search Fail!!!
Someone wanted to find Original Faces by AHRIZ.  So I search for it with the keyword "AHRIZ", but the result was blank.  However, when I search for "Faces" then this mod came up.
Why does the search failed for author in caps, but not with the keyword "Faces".  Are the reason for using caps for the author or have I miss something here?  :chinscratch:

Possibly because the author's name is spelled ARHIZ perhaps?

Yes I have returned  For the curious, please read & comment here so as to not clutter other threads.