1. Please check. https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/phb/combat#Reactions should be the "Top Find" for a search of "reactions", not the short mention of it in the monster appendix. Right now that page is even nowhere in the search results for "reactions".
The search really should at least add to the index what's in the book index. In the PHB, combat / reactions is definitely outlined. If you go through the page, you see the index on the left. All those entries should go to the search index as "top finds", and then the rest of the context should be added as secondary finds. That's not so hard to do.
Apparently these entries have been completely or partially left out in the indexing process.
index all chapter names, headlines and sub titles... these should always be the defaults for "top finds"
index everything else (fulltext indexing)
2. Even the fulltext indexing is apparently broken. Search for "sword". You will find nowhere longsword or shortsword in the results. They list all kind of magical weapons and stuff, but basic stuff like the weapons list apparently has been left out. Why?
3. Search results that contain special characters, do not work. properly. Search for "Gods". You will find "God's of Faerûn". The link you get is:
That doesn't match and this you land at the top of the page. Either fix the indexing to drop the special characters too or fix the html anchors to contain them.
The search bar is dreadful. I recently searched "Morden" because I wanted to look up Mordenkainen’s Private Sanctum, and got no result . "Mordenkainen" do not give any spell result either (it does give some results where the name appear). You have to actually type "mordenkainen's" to get all the relevant results.
This was really confusing and there's absolutely no need for it to work this way.
Yea, I also just found that special characters also break the search, see my updated comment. DNDBeyond really needs someone who's reading into how you index stuff ... how you treat special characters, how you find the actual "words" to index etc. There's lots of documents about that out there. Now we need to find a developer who actually cares. :D
We paid about 550 bucks or something for all the digital versions here ontop to the paper stuff we already also bought, so the ONE BENEFIT we have here is the search. It really should work properly or else all the money was spent uselessly.
The search function is atrocious on this website, I agree. I regularly find myself Googling for things rather than using DnD Beyond's search bar, and just end up on Roll20.
They've done nothing to fix this problem, and it's fundamental to the use of the site for accessing your purchased digital content.
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1. Please check. https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/phb/combat#Reactions should be the "Top Find" for a search of "reactions", not the short mention of it in the monster appendix. Right now that page is even nowhere in the search results for "reactions".
The search really should at least add to the index what's in the book index. In the PHB, combat / reactions is definitely outlined. If you go through the page, you see the index on the left. All those entries should go to the search index as "top finds", and then the rest of the context should be added as secondary finds. That's not so hard to do.
Apparently these entries have been completely or partially left out in the indexing process.
Index creation should go like this:
2. Even the fulltext indexing is apparently broken. Search for "sword". You will find nowhere longsword or shortsword in the results. They list all kind of magical weapons and stuff, but basic stuff like the weapons list apparently has been left out. Why?
3. Search results that contain special characters, do not work. properly. Search for "Gods". You will find "God's of Faerûn". The link you get is:
https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/scag/welcome-to-the-realms#TheGodsofFaerûn
Problem: the actual location is
https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/scag/welcome-to-the-realms#TheGodsofFaern
That doesn't match and this you land at the top of the page. Either fix the indexing to drop the special characters too or fix the html anchors to contain them.
Tillerz
So what you are saying is the search bar and it's results aren't helpful.
Everybody's been saying that for years.
I've been likening it to worse than what was comonplace in 2007.
The search bar is dreadful. I recently searched "Morden" because I wanted to look up Mordenkainen’s Private Sanctum, and got no result . "Mordenkainen" do not give any spell result either (it does give some results where the name appear). You have to actually type "mordenkainen's" to get all the relevant results.
This was really confusing and there's absolutely no need for it to work this way.
Click to learn to put cool-looking tooltips in your messages!
Yea, I also just found that special characters also break the search, see my updated comment. DNDBeyond really needs someone who's reading into how you index stuff ... how you treat special characters, how you find the actual "words" to index etc. There's lots of documents about that out there. Now we need to find a developer who actually cares. :D
We paid about 550 bucks or something for all the digital versions here ontop to the paper stuff we already also bought, so the ONE BENEFIT we have here is the search. It really should work properly or else all the money was spent uselessly.
Tillerz
The search function is atrocious on this website, I agree. I regularly find myself Googling for things rather than using DnD Beyond's search bar, and just end up on Roll20.
They've done nothing to fix this problem, and it's fundamental to the use of the site for accessing your purchased digital content.