Question about search results and a suggestion

curveball

Sometimes when I do a search I'm frustrated by getting a whole bunch of posts which include the search term only as part of the poster's signature, and the actual text of the comment has nothing at all to do with what I was trying to find. For example, searching for "herceptin" gives over 100,000 results, and who knows how many of them have any information about the targeted therapy drug. I tried sorting by relevance. That helped as now the first search result was a thread titled Herceptin. I checked the last page of the results and the posts there appeared to contain the word herceptin only as part of the signature.

My question is, does sorting by relevance send the "search term found only in signature" posts to the end of the list? My suggestion is to ask the tech people if it's possible to let users choose whether they want these included in the search results at all. With a word like herceptin that lots of people have in their signature, it could take a long time just to find the dividing line between the posts with herceptin in the title or text of the comment, and those that include the word in the signature only.

Moderators

curveball, we have this on our radar too; looking at whether we can include a checkbox or some other way to give searchers the option to exclude the diagnosis and treatment signature information from search results.

We'll add your suggestion to the mix, and hope we can get more useful search results.

Thank you for your suggestion!

• The Mods