EDIT: I just saw in the Global Search Announcement Thread that this is intended.
First thing that came up to my mind when trying it out was to type "beast". It seems that the search can display results that shouldn't be available for now. Typing in "beast" gave me:
Tried once again, this time with "Vecna". As I assumed:
Not sure if this is intended (The Vecna link redirects me to 403 Forbidden page = good, since it's not in the SRD) but I thought that this might be a problem.
Although my search results don't get the yellow highlights you got. I mean, I can get them with the browser's search, but then it also highlights the terms above the search results...
Also, after I get some search results, the round search "subject" buttons (characters, compendium, spells, etc.) don't narrow (or broaden) my search until I click the search icon again. That might be the desired behavior, but I expected it to filter results immediately.
I think it would be helpful if class abilities such as "Sneak Attack" and "Bardic Inspiration" were searchable under the system. As of right now, it might bring you to the correct class page for abilities like that but doesn't direct you straight to what the ability does.
Also, I don't think forum results should be included by default in the omni search (but having that button there could definitely be useful). For example, the current results for searching "Sneak Attack" bring up a long list of related forum posts, before it actually brings up the Rogue class page. I feel like the omni will be more heavily used to look up information on the fly and I don't know why someone would want to know about what person x said about the topic, on a moments notice.
Lastly, I agree with Nazim in that I expected the search results to filter instantaneously, like they do when you click on a class in the spell search or a type of monster. Because the interface is so similar between these search tools (categorical filters in circle-shaped buttons), I think that they should behave consistently across all searches.
As was already said: After searching, I expected the bubbles at the top to filter the results instantly instead of having to do a new search. (This was implemented as I was writing this. Kudos! But maybe don't reload the page every time, since all search results were already loaded.)
I also agree, that forum results should not be included by default. At least there should be an option to quickly do an "all but forum" filter. Right now I have to click every bubble but the forum bubble. It might help, if "all" wasn't a bubble itself, but a way to select all bubbles simultaneously. We could then just select all and then deselect the forum bubble. We would need a "deselect all" as well.
The search needs to be a bit more fuzzy: Right now, you can only search for full correctly written words. I expect the search to at least include plural and genitive case writings. For example, Evard’s Black Tentacles does not show up when searching for Evard or tentacle. I also expect the search for "fire ball" to return Fireball.
Hovering over a search result should open the popup window (if available), so we won't have to open the whole page just to see if the result is what we were looking for.
It is great to have suggestions while searching, but the suggestions don't seem to be very specific for D&D. I would expect the suggestions to come up with names like "Mordenkainen" after putting in "Morden". It suggests "model" and "mode" instead - but also "Moradin". Also, the suggestions try to correct my search for "Bardic Inspiration" to "Basic Inspiration" or "Bards Inspiration".
I also just found a bug:
When searching for "Evard's Black Tentacles", after clicking the "spells" bubble, the new search will only look for "Evard" and not return any result. It seems, everything after the apostrophe is cut off. The apostrophe seems to not be (un)escaped correctly for the second search.
That is all for now. I might update or post more if I find anything.
Although my search results don't get the yellow highlights you got. I mean, I can get them with the browser's search, but then it also highlights the terms above the search results...
Also, after I get some search results, the round search "subject" buttons (characters, compendium, spells, etc.) don't narrow (or broaden) my search until I click the search icon again. That might be the desired behavior, but I expected it to filter results immediately.
I had an... interesting interaction with the search.
I searched for "Adamant".
See, I didn't remember if it was Adamantite, Adamantine, Adamantium, or what have you (I may have had terms floating in my head due to a recent tweet).
I got a single result about dwarves and their adamant stance, and no suggestions. That wasn't weird, but I would mention it as a wanted feature (being able to discern typos, catch sub-parts of words, etc).
But then it got weirder:
To get what I needed, I searched for "Adamantite". I got expected results (forums, mostly, since it was the wrong term), but I got it, and by searching for the proper "Adamantine" I got what I wanted. And then I noticed the suggestion (there are suggestions!). But... in both my searches (I went back to check), the suggestion was for "Admantine", which lead to a single article (This one, which incidentally is a typo - bottom entry of the table).
Peculiar behavior. Why would it suggest a term with a single result instead of the proper "Adamantine" when I searched for "Adamantite"? And why no suggestions for "Adamant"?
Peryton shows up as using a talon attack as part of a multiattack, but not as the attack Talons. A good search engine has to be able to add an s to the end and try again.
To me the sorting of search results is somehow unusual or at least not what I would expect. I searched for Magic Weapon and what I got was:
Magic Weapon
Force Damage
Weapon +1
Dagger of Venom
Dragonborn
Weapon +3
May be it is just me, but I would expect to see a Weapon +1 right after the Magic Weapon and right after that weapon +2 and +3 and then all the other stuff. I guess you are ordering your results by the search terms found in the description. May be you should consider to give more weight to the title of an item. If you are already doing this, then there maybe something wrong with order of the results.
Wild card search doesn't seem to be in place. If I want to look up Thaumaturgy, but don't remember the exact name I'd search for e.g. *turgy, which doesn't return anything.
The spelling suggestions aren't very good yet. There seems to be some suggesting, but e.g. Thaumathurgy (with extra 'h') doesn't suggest or return anything.
This is just one example I wanted to look up without remembering exact name or spelling (which is obviously difficult when there are som many foreign words and names in D&D).
While the "Search Everything" at the top bar is very seamless with the whole design and feels very elegant, the white bar at the home page feels a little jarring. Perhaps a tiiiiny bit of transparency, so at least it flows with the background visual while still being distinct?
As others have mentioned, it looks like the search is not filtering out "premium" content. When I search for "floating disk", I get a link to Tenser's Floating Disk, even though that's not part of the basic content.
Also, I searched originally for "floating disc", but got no results at all. I think it'd be great if it could find "Floating Disk" from that.
As others have mentioned, it looks like the search is not filtering out "premium" content. When I search for "floating disk", I get a link to Tenser's Floating Disk, even though that's not part of the basic content.
Also, I searched originally for "floating disc", but got no results at all. I think it'd be great if it could find "Floating Disk" from that.
We chose to go ahead and allow the premium content to be returned in the results since we are showing only small snippets of text in the results. Clicking through to the actual items will result in a 403 Forbidden until the content is unlocked.
In regards to the "disc" vs. "disk", I'll be working on the nGram and Stemmers this weekend to make the query a little more lenient.
Thanks for the feedback everyone. It will really help use fine-tune the system!
As a power user in general, namespaces would be awesome. Being able to shortcut searches to a specific domain would be great.
For example, using "race:orc" would return just races with orc in the title. Similarly, "spell:fireball" would return spells with fireball in the title.
Been toying around with this, and I have further feedback on the leniency of the query.
Despite "grapple" being the the Contests In Combat page, it does not show up in the results. Instead, the rules for monster grappling comes up. Interestingly, it works fine if you use the word "grappling". Hopefully stuff like this isn't too hard to fix. :)
Why are there two search fields? I see one at the top of my page in black with the words 'Search Everything...' but I also see a large white field with a light blue button that reads 'Search.' Do we need both?
Aesthetically, that light blue button doesn't at all fit the color palette of the rest of the website.
As a power user in general, namespaces would be awesome. Being able to shortcut searches to a specific domain would be great.
For example, using "race:orc" would return just races with orc in the title. Similarly, "spell:fireball" would return spells with fireball in the title.
Other than that it's great to see this feature.
The namespaces and other search features for power users would be great, especially as the monster manual starts to come into play.
While searching "poison spell" the result for Sample Poisons from the Compendium has the little " " code before it.
Also the results for "healing" show up in what seemed like an odd order when it got to the potions:
Healing
Healing Word
Potion of Healing
Potion of Healing (Greater)
Potion of Healing (Superior)
Mass Healing Word
Staff of Healing
Potion of Healing (Supreme)
The order seemed a little weird to me, however I'm not sure if this is just the nature of search logic. I wanted to point it out just in case.
Finally, I didn't notice the top result was showing up on the right underneath the search bar after you do a search until a couple of searches into it. I think it's a really cool feature and the box with the description of it is great, it just seems a little hidden in the current layout.
Please leave your feedback here for the Global Search, and help us improve it!
A dwarf with a canoe on his back? What could go wrong?
EDIT: I just saw in the Global Search Announcement Thread that this is intended.
First thing that came up to my mind when trying it out was to type "beast".

It seems that the search can display results that shouldn't be available for now.
Typing in "beast" gave me:
Tried once again, this time with "Vecna". As I assumed:

Not sure if this is intended (The Vecna link redirects me to 403 Forbidden page = good, since it's not in the SRD) but I thought that this might be a problem.
My 5e Houserule Considerations. Please comment freely.
Moving my comment since this thread is now created.
Just tried out the global search function. Awesome.
The filters were not responding on my mobile device.
I think it would be helpful if class abilities such as "Sneak Attack" and "Bardic Inspiration" were searchable under the system. As of right now, it might bring you to the correct class page for abilities like that but doesn't direct you straight to what the ability does.
Also, I don't think forum results should be included by default in the omni search (but having that button there could definitely be useful). For example, the current results for searching "Sneak Attack" bring up a long list of related forum posts, before it actually brings up the Rogue class page. I feel like the omni will be more heavily used to look up information on the fly and I don't know why someone would want to know about what person x said about the topic, on a moments notice.
Lastly, I agree with Nazim in that I expected the search results to filter instantaneously, like they do when you click on a class in the spell search or a type of monster. Because the interface is so similar between these search tools (categorical filters in circle-shaped buttons), I think that they should behave consistently across all searches.
First of all: Thanks for this great addition!
Now to the feedback:
As was already said: After searching, I expected the bubbles at the top to filter the results instantly instead of having to do a new search.(This was implemented as I was writing this. Kudos! But maybe don't reload the page every time, since all search results were already loaded.)I also just found a bug:
That is all for now. I might update or post more if I find anything.
Note: The link to Evard’s Black Tentacles did not work before. I figured out, that the link seems to expect the "right single quotation mark" (U+2019) instead of the apostrophe (U+0027). The same is true for Mordenkainen’s Sword, Mordenkainen’s Private Sanctum, and Mordenkainen’s Faithful Hound. Mordenkainen's Magnificent Mansion does use a regular apostrophe though! Fix maybe?
Front End Developer for D&D Beyond by day,
Half Orc BarbarianGnome SorcererDuergar ClericAarakocra Barb/Rogue/Fighter (yeah yeah i know) by night.this has really gotten Adohand.
I had an... interesting interaction with the search.
I searched for "Adamant".
See, I didn't remember if it was Adamantite, Adamantine, Adamantium, or what have you (I may have had terms floating in my head due to a recent tweet).
I got a single result about dwarves and their adamant stance, and no suggestions. That wasn't weird, but I would mention it as a wanted feature (being able to discern typos, catch sub-parts of words, etc).
But then it got weirder:
To get what I needed, I searched for "Adamantite". I got expected results (forums, mostly, since it was the wrong term), but I got it, and by searching for the proper "Adamantine" I got what I wanted. And then I noticed the suggestion (there are suggestions!). But... in both my searches (I went back to check), the suggestion was for "Admantine", which lead to a single article (This one, which incidentally is a typo - bottom entry of the table).
Peculiar behavior. Why would it suggest a term with a single result instead of the proper "Adamantine" when I searched for "Adamantite"? And why no suggestions for "Adamant"?
Peryton shows up as using a talon attack as part of a multiattack, but not as the attack Talons.
A good search engine has to be able to add an s to the end and try again.
To me the sorting of search results is somehow unusual or at least not what I would expect. I searched for Magic Weapon and what I got was:
Magic Weapon
Force Damage
Weapon +1
Dagger of Venom
Dragonborn
Weapon +3
May be it is just me, but I would expect to see a Weapon +1 right after the Magic Weapon and right after that weapon +2 and +3 and then all the other stuff. I guess you are ordering your results by the search terms found in the description. May be you should consider to give more weight to the title of an item. If you are already doing this, then there maybe something wrong with order of the results.
Wild card search doesn't seem to be in place. If I want to look up Thaumaturgy, but don't remember the exact name I'd search for e.g. *turgy, which doesn't return anything.
The spelling suggestions aren't very good yet. There seems to be some suggesting, but e.g. Thaumathurgy (with extra 'h') doesn't suggest or return anything.
This is just one example I wanted to look up without remembering exact name or spelling (which is obviously difficult when there are som many foreign words and names in D&D).
On an entire visual feedback note...
While the "Search Everything" at the top bar is very seamless with the whole design and feels very elegant, the white bar at the home page feels a little jarring. Perhaps a tiiiiny bit of transparency, so at least it flows with the background visual while still being distinct?
I love Elasticsearch!
As others have mentioned, it looks like the search is not filtering out "premium" content. When I search for "floating disk", I get a link to Tenser's Floating Disk, even though that's not part of the basic content.
Also, I searched originally for "floating disc", but got no results at all. I think it'd be great if it could find "Floating Disk" from that.
I am the Inquisitor Imperitus. I am judge, jury, and executioner. Draw your last breath now, as I send you to the Nine Hells.
As a power user in general, namespaces would be awesome. Being able to shortcut searches to a specific domain would be great.
For example, using "race:orc" would return just races with orc in the title. Similarly, "spell:fireball" would return spells with fireball in the title.
Other than that it's great to see this feature.
Been toying around with this, and I have further feedback on the leniency of the query.
Despite "grapple" being the the Contests In Combat page, it does not show up in the results. Instead, the rules for monster grappling comes up. Interestingly, it works fine if you use the word "grappling". Hopefully stuff like this isn't too hard to fix. :)
Awesome feature though!
Keep them coming!! :D
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Why are there two search fields? I see one at the top of my page in black with the words 'Search Everything...' but I also see a large white field with a light blue button that reads 'Search.' Do we need both?
Aesthetically, that light blue button doesn't at all fit the color palette of the rest of the website.
I'm on the DM's Guild: click here
The order seemed a little weird to me, however I'm not sure if this is just the nature of search logic. I wanted to point it out just in case.
Finally, I didn't notice the top result was showing up on the right underneath the search bar after you do a search until a couple of searches into it. I think it's a really cool feature and the box with the description of it is great, it just seems a little hidden in the current layout.
Thanks again, the search is awesome!
Autocomplete Suggester
If the search is good enough, an autocomplete suggestion would be great. E.g.
Typing T H A U M then just see the full word below and click right to it would make it much faster to get to the right result.
Otherwise, I really like the feature!