Please Bring back the old search function

[Jake Matterson]

Please Bring back the old search function and how it change and highlighted saved sessions when searching for a word. It also highlighted any links if they had said keyword. Also please tell me how I can downgrade until this issue is resolved. Thank you. 

[john s wolter]

I wonder if the old search could exist in parallel with the new search.

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On Wed, Mar 13, 2024 at 1:44 PM Jake Matterson <melonc...@gmail.com> wrote:

Please Bring back the old search function and how it change and highlighted saved sessions when searching for a word. It also highlighted any links if they had said keyword. Also please tell me how I can downgrade until this issue is resolved. Thank you. 

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[Peter M]

I miss the search being able to look in the URL as well as the title - I'm pretty sure the previous version did that. 

[Session Buddy Support]

> I miss the search being able to look in the URL as well as the title

This will be fixed in the forthcoming v4.0.2 release.

Hans

On Sat, Mar 16, 2024 at 1:20 PM Peter M <pet...@tolwong.com> wrote:

I miss the search being able to look in the URL as well as the title - I'm pretty sure the previous version did that. 

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[Mohammad Noor]

Oh how dearly I miss the old search. It was PERFECT. 

[Session Buddy Support]

Search changed a lot and there are certainly opportunities for refining it.

The flip-side of this is that a ton of feedback was received over the years to make search behave more like actual search instead of filtering, with proper search term parsing, scoring, and matching on individual collections, folders, and links.

The new search is designed specifically to help you locate a particular collection, folder, or link, BUT its effectiveness is tied directly to the specificity of your search terms. Eg, if you search for a "discord" link and also include part of the collection name (eg, "restored sessions") in your search terms, that collection and links in that collection will appear near the top of search results. This is better than the dump it was giving you before and is aligned with how a search feature is generally expected to work.

Yes, the scoring is not perfect yet and some things like matching on items in the current session and history need to be fixed. These things WILL be fixed and improve dramatically over time and we're grateful for feedback from folks such as yourself who are interested in working with us through open dialog to perfect it to suit everyone's needs.

Bear in mind also that the new search opens up some pretty nice new opportunities. One such opportunity is the addition of powerful metadata querying like "created: >2024-01-01", "tab-count: >100", and "type: link". This has been part of the vision for search all along.

It's understood this all takes some getting used to and your patience and tolerance as we work to improve it is massively appreciated.

Hans

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[Rd]

True. Without search it is useless. I can't do anything right now because I can't even search for a particular URL part or a domain...

[Session Buddy Support]

URL matching is a fix included in the forthcoming v4.0.2

Hans

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[R Cache]

Forgive me, but I cannot think of a search function in any type of software or app that DOES NOT allow the end-user to specify how results should be sorted.

To reiterate @Mohammad Noor's sentiment, the prior version of search worked extremely well.

And the implementation of the drop-down results versus the way the results in v3.x were displayed is an enormous step backwards. 

[Session Buddy Support]

>  I cannot think of a search function in any type of software or app that DOES NOT allow the end-user to specify how results should be sorted

Well SB v3 didn't and Google search doesn't, to name the first two that come to mind.

I don't understand how sorting relates to my response. Did you mean something else?

Hans

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[R Cache]

Apologies.

Neither the portion of your reply that I quoted nor the entirety of that first sentence of mine is there.

This is how it should have read:

"to make search behave more like actual search"

Forgive me, but I cannot think of a search function in any type of software or app that DOES NOT allow the end-user to specify how results should be sorted or at least default to a sort by reverse chronological order.

To reiterate @Mohammad Noor's sentiment, the prior version of search worked extremely well.

And the implementation of the drop-down results versus the way the results in v3.x were displayed is an enormous step backwards. 

[FW]

If this isn't fixed in a few days I'm looking for a new session manager and I've been using Session Buddy since launch. The filter search method was centric so how I used this extension and increased productivity. Please at least make the new search results take up the whole window, it's impossible to find anything from a 1000+ results as it currently is.

[Peter M]

URL matching is a fix included in the forthcoming v4.0.2

Great! This is the biggest problem for me - sometimes I know the domain name but the website doesn't put their company name in the page title. Google Groups is a prime example - this tab is called "Please bring back the old search function" in Session Buddy so I wouldn't find it searching for "google" or "groups"

[Session Buddy Support]

Glad that helps, Peter.

Note also that in this case using words in the title in combination with "google" and/or "groups" will raise the relevant result towards the top.

Another exciting search feature we're working on is metadata queries so you can target your search with stuff like: title: search old url: google groups

Hans

On Sat, Mar 16, 2024 at 7:01 PM Peter M <pet...@tolwong.com> wrote:

URL matching is a fix included in the forthcoming v4.0.2

Great! This is the biggest problem for me - sometimes I know the domain name but the website doesn't put their company name in the page title. Google Groups is a prime example - this tab is called "Please bring back the old search function" in Session Buddy so I wouldn't find it searching for "google" or "groups"

On Sunday 17 March 2024 at 9:29:48 am UTC+11 Session Buddy Support wrote:

URL matching is a fix included in the forthcoming v4.0.2

Hans

On Sat, Mar 16, 2024 at 3:19 PM Rd <rudi...@gmail.com> wrote:

True. Without search it is useless. I can't do anything right now because I can't even search for a particular URL part or a domain...

On Saturday, March 16, 2024 at 10:11:57 PM UTC+2 Mohammad Noor wrote:

Oh how dearly I miss the old search. It was PERFECT. 

On Saturday, March 16, 2024 at 3:20:23 PM UTC-4 Peter M wrote:

I miss the search being able to look in the URL as well as the title - I'm pretty sure the previous version did that. 

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[FW]

Hey dev, can you stop ignoring the OP and many of your users original request to bring back the old search? Instead of responding with other new features no one wants or cares about? The entire new search needs to be scrapped, I'm sorry but it's terrible. There is no fixing it, just bring back the old search, the way it was, like a filter. Just adding URL searching doesn't fix the problem. It's a mess, have you tried searching for something when you have 1000+ saved sessions (or I'm sorry, "collections") yourself? If not, please try it and see if you're happy with the results.

This whole thing reminds me of when a videogame introduces a bug, users bring it to the attention of the developers and they respond "it's a feature". Like somehow thousands of people can be wrong about something so obvious and only you can be right. It's completely mindboggling.

[Session Buddy Support]

> can you stop ignoring the OP and many of your users original request to bring back the old search?

I've responded in multiple threads to questions and concerns about search. There's a detailed response in this thread. If you read my responses you'll see I'm happy to engage on and address specifics. Just stating it's terrible doesn't give me much to respond to.

Hans

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[Mohammad Noor]

Hans, please don't even bother with the people who post negative comments without even reading. Waste of time and energy, better to ignore them. 

[MiNi]

I think the biggest drawback is not the search (and the new search options), but the mostly the presentation of the search result.

At first step there should be an option (or something) to show the search result NOT in a dropdown, but in a full detail list. 

Then we have something like before with the "filter", and then a user can do some actions with the search result.

[FW]

>Just stating it's terrible doesn't give me much to respond to.

You didn't read the rest of my message. I actually like a lot of the new features in this update: dark mode, check marking links, right click menus, etc.

But NO one likes this new Search and it severely hurts an otherwise great extension. The old Filter method was core to the function of the extension. You typed in a keyword and had all your sessions without that keyword filtered with the links in those sessions matching highlighted. The results took up the entire window, not some small 4" x 5" inch drop down that's impossible to scroll through.

Simple. Please bring that back.

Have you tried searching for something when you have 1000+ saved sessions (or I'm sorry, "collections") yourself? If not, please try it and see if you're happy with the results.

[Rd]

I agree about the search. I have like 40,000 tabs saved over the years... How can I remove even similar links at once now when I have reviewed them? It just forces me to look at one by one now, which greatly reduces productivity. Even F3 search is more useful now (for me at least).
Previously I just entered a part of URL without any # or %.... parts and it filtered what I wanted to see, then I could remove all duplicated or similar links and sites off my entire SB DB easily...

[Melody Nelson]

Hans, 

I think the new search and old filter search can serve a very different purpose. I've read quite a lot of comments here and on the store, and looks like most people use cases for the old search were so much more than just finding that one specific tab.

Did you consider maintaining both search and filter functions simultaneously?

Users of SB have amassed a large amounts of data and history. Searching for something specific can easily yield hundreds of results, and the current search solution for that is clicking - going back to results - clicking - going back, which is not very effective and you have to scroll a lot.  What about all those cases where you want to find multiple results for your search within a collection? What about when you want to compare that between multiple collections? What about when your search goal is to find and delete all matching results? It was so easy with the filter, so maybe the filter still has it's relevance for a lot of cases?

Also, from what I see, A LOT of users (me including) have most of their collections untitled since it was "titled" as date by default, and many found it enough for their purpose. But now, collections list looks like hundreds of "untitled 5 month ago" and "untitled 2 years ago" with no way to differentiate, and search results look like hundreds "link in untitled" with no way to differ between them without clicking one by one.

Please, do not think about the filter as an "old redundant search implementation", try thinking about it as a way to filter the current view, or even the whole amount of SB data. Filters like that have all the chances to peacefully coexist with the new search. You could add 2 Icons next to the search field - search and filter. Pressing search leads to a normal text search, with weighted fuzzy results, etc. But if you press a filter button instead, it filters the current view as it did before, but also a proper filters panel appears to the left of the button. There you can multi-select affected result types (all, this view, this browser, history, collection names, tabs, named windows), data types (text and/or url), set a date range and date type (creation, update). The result of a filter can be multiple selected tabs in the current collection, or across the multiple collections, which you could delete or merge to a new collection just with the theme of those results. I think that filter feature has a lot of organizing potential, since now it won't just highlight things, but can also take advantage of the new batch selection features (close/delete, combine into new, copy/move, clear duplicates etc).

As an afterword for the collection naming: I saw your suggestion in the FAQ about properly naming collections, but for old collections that is a lot of work, and, a lot of the time those collections do not have a common "theme", there's just a backup of multiple unfinished researches per single session (a lot of people with ADHD suffer from info overload and save those mixed sessions just to start anew and come back later). So the date naming made more sense than anything. I understand that by renaming "Sessions" to "Collections" you want to promote thematic collection use, but enforcing that via UI (i.e. lack of info in collection list and search results) for old users with hundreds of old collections is not very user-friendly. And it needs features like batch filtering and moving to effectively re-organize it first.

[ethan]

Hi Hans,
can we at least get back the way search results was presented in v3, list the sessions that contained relevant results, and use the whole screen not just the window.

as it is right now, with my hundreds of daily saved sessions, its so tedious to find a specific collection, its basically impossible, i've tried and many times to use the new search, but its just not intuitive, and i've given up as many times.

I've also submitted a fairly lengthy post, detailing the other useful use cases the v3 search had over v4, a couple days ago, but i see it wasn't approved, I would really appreciate it, if you could provide feedback on that post.

[ethan]

Hi Hans, this is a repost of my post (with some minor edits) that wasn't approved , i apologize in advance for the repost, but i really hope you can address the points in my posts, and let me know your thoughts.

I hope you approve and respond to this, so we can have an open dialogue.


I know that such a massive change from v3 must have taken a lot of effort, but i would like to echo the sentiments i've seen regarding the new Search in v4

The new Search in v4 is objectively worse than it was in v3, the only advantage i've seen in my usage, is that it does seem to have fuzzy search capabilities, but in my experience with it, it just populates the search with unnecessary links, muddling the results. It seems over-engineered for its purpose, a tab management search.

The old v3 filter-search was far more useful, and provided a lot of versatility, it was, in my opinion, the best filter/search in any tab management extension out there.

• only remember the url, and not the title?
  • well here's all the sessions that had the url, and all the urls that match in each session
• don't remember the exact link, but remember other links in the same window?
  • well here's all the session that had that link, and with a click you can view all the other tabs in that session or window
• open a lot of links from the same site, and don't remember the exact title?
  • well here's all the links for each session, layed out as per normal (which was phenomenal btw)
  • and best of all you don't have the continuously scroll possibly hundreds of results (which you would need to in the new v4 search)

I understand that a lot of effort must have been put into development into the new Search in v4, but i've seen a lot of feedback both here, and in the CWS reviews, that mention how much they would like the old search back, and i personally would love for it back too.

v3 Filter-Search was optimal, i had hundreds of saved sessions, and it was always easy to find whatever i searched for. Now it's just another ordinary search, less productive, less usable, and far less outstanding.

I've seen a some mention regarding some of the old features being removed due to how complicated it would be to support it for cloud. If v3 Filter-Search was victim to this, I'd like to add that I (personally) would rather v3 Filter-Search than cloud support (though this may be controversial).
Previously I wanted to use Session Buddy on all my browser and computers, and cloud support would have been great, but now I'd rather manually migrate my session backup to each computer and browser, than lose the functionality that I was using Session Buddy for in the first place.

If the threshold preventing v3-Filter-Search from being re-implemented is cloud support, i would much prefer if it was a choice.

• Would you rather cloud support or filter?
  • turning on filter, will disable cloud support, etc

I sincerely hope you consider adding v3 Filter-Search back, please let me know what you think.
Thank You

On Sunday, March 17, 2024 at 10:28:04 PM UTC+8 Session Buddy Support wrote:

[S T]

Specifically I request that something akin to the old search results filtering function (for both the "collections" and the tabs (with option to turn tab filtering on/off)) be brought back, at least as an option. For me this was critical to how I have used and relied upon Session Buddy for many years. Finding the sessions themselves was of significant value, not just the specific tabs that the searched term found. Then once I found the sessions I could expand the results within that session to see all tabs as needed. 

With the current search I get a lot of results that are from the same session or sessions which is a needle in a haystack situation at best. I understand that the new search can offer more advanced possibilities, however some of the examples provided would require the user to already know or have memorized many attributes of the historical data to even make use of that. With hundreds of stored sessions that seems like something that would be more of a rare use case or for more advanced users. 

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[germany1]

I completely agree with the above posters. The loss of functionality with the new search is pretty immense. When you use the search, the results are displayed in no particular order, at least not in any useful way. I searched for a term that I know was in one of my recent previous sessions, within the last couple of days, and the first result is from 3 years ago. The next few results are 6 months, 4 months, 10 months. There are more than a thousand results, that isn't sorted by name or date. How will I ever find the collection I'm looking for? It only displays five results at a time, with the only information shown is the tab and collection name. I literally have to click through each one to see how long ago the collection was. Basically the new search function is useless and the only way for me to find the tab I was looking for originally is going through my collections and history. 

And although this is unrelated to the search function, since we're on the new history feature, I also think this is a downgrade with loss of efficiency. Having the history and collection sessions separate like before, was perfect. I can edit and change either at will. Now, I have close to a hundred snapshots just from the past five days. I'm also unable to edit the history sessions like I was able to previously. I now have to save "browser closed" history sessions, then edit it as a collection. So now I just have all these permanently tucked away old history sessions that I would have to manually save and edit? I have thousands of sessions, that's not remotely feasible. 

[Hugo G.]

Can we get the ability to search the history tabs back at least?

[Session Buddy Support]

> Can we get the ability to search the history tabs back at least?

Working on it. https://sessionbuddy.com/release-4-0-3/

Hans

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[Our Free Society]

How am I supposed to update to vs 4.03 without removing it from Brave & then reinstalling it which means I'll lose everything, right?

The search isn't finding any of my tabs. Did you fix that in 4.03?

Thanks

[Session Buddy Support]

> How am I supposed to update to vs 4.0.3 in Brave

1. navigate to brave://extensions/
2. turn on Developer mode (top-right of page)
3. click the Update button (top left of page)
4. verify version number v4.0.3 in footer of Session Buddy's Settings dialog

Hans

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