Rental Property Investor · Beverly Hills, CA · Member since 2014 · 472 posts · 272 votes
Let's say I was doing a search for a topic like "lease option" and I wanted to find the posts and/or threads with the highest number of votes, replies or some other measure of "popularity".
Hey @Joshua McGinnis at this moment there is not a good way to do that - BUT I am writing this down for the developer. I've been thinking lately of revamping the search system and how users can sort results. I think you've just given us some good ideas. Any other ideas - feel free to add them!
It seems like you've got some great devs on staff. I'm sure they'll tell you that search can be a tough technical cookie when you start talking about indexing lots of data and customers like me starting asking for more complex search queries.
I recommend checking out ElasticSearch or Amazon CloudSearch to take on the challenge of powering the BP search if they haven't already.
That said, here is a list of sorting attributes that I think would make the search results more powerful:
Visits
Popularity (derived from several attributes you guys can define)
Number of Votes
# of Replies
I think those facets combined with the existing timeframe, user, and forum filters would really help BP users find the most relevant and helpful posts to them.