Tags (Portal vs. Search)

[dasgoodshit]

Welp, I'm stumped.

I just searched for "domination" in the Tags Portal. Result: 105 pages, with a maximum of 100 stories per page. Total: at most 10,500.

Went to the Story Search to remove a few categories that I didn't want to see, but I forgot. Total: 14,897. (Edit: this is TAGS ONLY. Searching Titles and Text returns 13,852.)

What the flying fuck? A THIRD of all stories aren't showing up in the Tags Portal search? Really?

I already knew that there was something wrong with the Tags Portal because the word cloud doesn't function as intended (ex: "exhibitionist" appears more commonly used than "exhibitionism," and so on), but this is truly bizarre. Anyone know what the reason for this wild discrepancy is? It isn't new stories, because New show up in Tags Portal search results.

 

[NotWise]

By default, the Story Search searches titles and text rather than tags. I set it to search tags and got about the same result. That makes me think it might be searching titles and text, even if you tell it to search tags.

 

[Bamagan]

Possibly the keyword search is turning up results that include the term in the title and/or blurb as well as the tags.

 

[Bramblethorn]

By default, the Story Search searches titles and text rather than tags. I set it to search tags and got about the same result. That makes me think it might be searching titles and text, even if you tell it to search tags.

I think Story Search is searching tags (when set appropriately), but it returns any stories with tags that include the search text, whereas the Tags Portal only shows those with an exact match.

For instance, the first story in those 14,897 Story Search hits for "domination" is one that's tagged for "online domination" but not simple "domination". https://www.literotica.com/s/begging-for-painful-pleasures

When I tried the Tags Portal for "domination", the first five hits all had "domination" as the tag. My guess is the discrepancy is stories with tags like "female domination" etc. but not just "domination".

 

[dasgoodshit]

I think Story Search is searching tags (when set appropriately), but it returns any stories with tags that include the search text, whereas the Tags Portal only shows those with an exact match.

For instance, the first story in those 14,897 Story Search hits for "domination" is one that's tagged for "online domination" but not simple "domination". https://www.literotica.com/s/begging-for-painful-pleasures

When I tried the Tags Portal for "domination", the first five hits all had "domination" as the tag. My guess is the discrepancy is stories with tags like "female domination" etc. but not just "domination".

@Laurel, I'd love to help with stuff like this, in general. No effort required on my end. Can prove experience. I don't even need access; I can just tell you what you need to code. HMU

 

[OverconfidentSarcasm]

Welp, I'm stumped.

I just searched for "domination" in the Tags Portal. Result: 105 pages, with a maximum of 100 stories per page. Total: at most 10,500.

Went to the Story Search to remove a few categories that I didn't want to see, but I forgot. Total: 14,897. (Edit: this is TAGS ONLY. Searching Titles and Text returns 13,852.)

What the flying fuck? A THIRD of all stories aren't showing up in the Tags Portal search? Really?

I already knew that there was something wrong with the Tags Portal because the word cloud doesn't function as intended (ex: "exhibitionist" appears more commonly used than "exhibitionism," and so on), but this is truly bizarre. Anyone know what the reason for this wild discrepancy is? It isn't new stories, because New show up in Tags Portal search results.

As far as I can tell, the Tags-Portal looks for exact matches with the Tags you provided. So, if you want stories with the tag "domination", you will get stories that are tagged with "domination".

The story search, however, looks for occurrences of the provided search term. Because it has to, since the search term is buried somewhere in a long text. If you use "domination" here, it will search for any and all tags that CONTAIN the provided search term.

To pick up @Bramblethorn's example: Try it out with "online domination" in the story search, set to look for tags only.
If you put that search term into quotation marks, you will get three results that are actually tagged with "online domination". But if you remove the quotation marks, you will find stories with tags that simply contain one of those words, "online" or "domination", because spaces are treated as separators to provide the closest match even if the user can't remember the exact phrasing of a sentence, for example.

So, in short: The Tag-Portal works explicitly. Story searches work ambiguously, and therefore give you a lot more results, but those extra results are less accurate.

Now, that being said, that's how a search function is SUPPOSED to work. So, then tagging Laurel to tell her how to code something, after not even understanding the basic functionality of a text search is... bold... to say the least.

 

[dasgoodshit]

As far as I can tell, the Tags-Portal looks for exact matches with the Tags you provided. So, if you want stories with the tag "domination", you will get stories that are tagged with "domination".

The story search, however, looks for occurrences of the provided search term. Because it has to, since the search term is buried somewhere in a long text. If you use "domination" here, it will search for any and all tags that CONTAIN the provided search term.

To pick up @Bramblethorn's example: Try it out with "online domination" in the story search, set to look for tags only.
If you put that search term into quotation marks, you will get three results that are actually tagged with "online domination". But if you remove the quotation marks, you will find stories with tags that simply contain one of those words, "online" or "domination", because spaces are treated as separators to provide the closest match even if the user can't remember the exact phrasing of a sentence, for example.

So, in short: The Tag-Portal works explicitly. Story searches work ambiguously, and therefore give you a lot more results, but those extra results are less accurate.

Now, that being said, that's how a search function is SUPPOSED to work. So, then tagging Laurel to tell her how to code something, after not even understanding the basic functionality of a text search is... bold... to say the least.

*Absolutely no snark was used in the wording of this message*

I understand the functionality as it exists (as of about 6 hours ago after using it for years assuming a different outcome). I don't understand why it would have intentionally been coded that way considering that there's no explanation of what the results mean. I certainly wouldn't have coded it like that. Lol, what's bold about saying, "Your hands are full; let me get the door for you..." if everybody wins and it requires no effort? I don't even want to know how many fires she has to put out every single day around here, but if I'm walking by with two buckets of water that I don't need, then I'm going to offer them because I'm not an asshole.

I'll give you that searching Titles and Text should work using wildcard matches, but I've never even heard of such a thing with Tags, ever, not in a front-end tool. Tags are keys, and in the data industry, keys are sometimes merged into superkeys, but they never shrink. Ever. A superkey might, but not a key. It might be the intended functionality; it might not. If it was intended that way, then it's performing as expected. I only have years and years of professional experience to draw from, so what do I know. All I can say is that I've never seen anything like this before, and that it defies expectations and everything I've experienced doing stuff infinitely more complex than this.

 

[Bramblethorn]

*Absolutely no snark was used in the wording of this message*

I understand the functionality as it exists (as of about 6 hours ago after using it for years assuming a different outcome). I don't understand why it would have intentionally been coded that way considering that there's no explanation of what the results mean.

It may be non-standard, but given the current limitations of Literotica tagging, the way the Story Search handles it seems defensible.

Say I write a SF/F story with aspects of female domination and female submission with rope bondage and spanking. Relevant tags would include:

"female dominance", which is a subset of "dominance", which is a subset of "dominance and submission", which is a subset of "BDSM"
"female submission", which is a subset of "submission", plus others above
"spanking", subset of "impact play", subset of "sado-masochism"; also subset of "bondage and discipline"
"rope bondage", subset of "bondage", subset of etc.
"lesbian"

That's already three tags more than I'm allowed, even before trying to tag for anything else that might be in the story. It's not possible to tag that story for every activity a reader might be searching on. I might end up just tagging at the most specific level: "female dominance", "female submission", "spanking", "rope bondage", "lesbian", and five more tags for other story content.

But even if I do that, "female dominance" implies "dominance", etc. etc. A search for "dominance" should include results for "female dominance".

There are more sophisticated ways this could be handled; another site I'm on defines parent, child, and synonym tags, so if I tag for "female dominance" it already knows that this is a form of "BDSM", and equivalent to "femdom" (is that the kind of thing you mean by "superkey"?) But that takes a lot of work to set up and maintain. Short of that, returning "tag includes" results seems more likely to be giving readers what they wanted to find.

(I do think that this could be better documented, though!)

 

[dasgoodshit]

It may be non-standard, but given the current limitations of Literotica tagging, the way the Story Search handles it seems defensible.

Say I write a SF/F story with aspects of female domination and female submission with rope bondage and spanking. Relevant tags would include:

"female dominance", which is a subset of "dominance", which is a subset of "dominance and submission", which is a subset of "BDSM"
"female submission", which is a subset of "submission", plus others above
"spanking", subset of "impact play", subset of "sado-masochism"; also subset of "bondage and discipline"
"rope bondage", subset of "bondage", subset of etc.
"lesbian"

That's already three tags more than I'm allowed, even before trying to tag for anything else that might be in the story. It's not possible to tag that story for every activity a reader might be searching on. I might end up just tagging at the most specific level: "female dominance", "female submission", "spanking", "rope bondage", "lesbian", and five more tags for other story content.

But even if I do that, "female dominance" implies "dominance", etc. etc. A search for "dominance" should include results for "female dominance".

There are more sophisticated ways this could be handled; another site I'm on defines parent, child, and synonym tags, so if I tag for "female dominance" it already knows that this is a form of "BDSM", and equivalent to "femdom" (is that the kind of thing you mean by "superkey"?) But that takes a lot of work to set up and maintain. Short of that, returning "tag includes" results seems more likely to be giving readers what they wanted to find.

(I do think that this could be better documented, though!)

Tagging at the most specific level. Yes, this does seem to be the best approach. After all, why tag a story with "bdsm" if it's going to the bdsm category? It's funny that you mention this now, because in the last week I've been thinking about this a lot and wondering if it might help to be both specific and broad. Case in point: Related Tags, which help users dive to a deeper level. If the user wants to find something in "dominance" but they don't know what, they can look at the related tags and find: reluctance, exhibitionism, spanking, etc., If a user clicks a related tag, they'll be presented with the stories that contain both "dominance" and "spanking," for instance. The user might not want just any spanking story, and for that matter they might not have known they wanted one at that moment until they read the tag. The point that I'm trying to make is that if you don't have the broader tags included, then you risk losing readers that are waiting for the mood to strike them. Annnndddd I just convinced myself to do exactly that from now on.

Limitations of tagging. That's a fair point. So many tags are just garbage, or they're misspelled and essentially worthless. Why have 10 different ways to indicate "noncon?" I'd happily delete a couple of completed, unpublished stories for the chance to do a "find and replace," if you will, on "non-con," "non-consent," "nonconsent," etc., if tags were to be standardized at submission, when possible. Of course, if I had just one query that I could run, it would be to obtain a day's worth of query history. Damn, that would be so enlightening. *Sighs whistfully.*

Keys. Well... superkeys are used to help uniquely identify records. I was just using that as an example for how keys can get larger. The tags themselves are foreign keys, meaning there is a table called "Tags" (with Tag_ID as the primary key), and you wouldn't combine FKs and expect to uniquely identify a record. Although, now that I'm thinking about it, that would mean two extra tables and a more complex query, to not save that much in terms of storage space. Hmmm... Given the fact that readers use commas to search for multiple tags, and that authors use commas to separate their tags at submission, it is quite possible that the decision was made to include all tags for a story in a field called "tags" in the "Story" table. But who knows for sure how it's actually set up? Don't answer that, lol. Database design is dependant on a number of factors, to whit, server storage, your server's processing power, the number of queries being performed at any given time... There's no one "right" way to do it; architects will forever debate the practice of having more versus less tables in a database.

I'm not sold on the idea that searching within tags has a benefit without a modification. What if I search for "sex" and stories with "no sex" are returned? How annoyed would you be if you read a 15k story to the end to find out there was no sex? What would give the Tags Search better functionality would be to display the tags used in the story along with the description, preferably with the tag(s) that matched the search term highlighted in some way. This would be cool on the Tags Portal as well. Anywhere there's a story name and description, actually.

What's the name of the site with parent and child tags that you were talking about?

 

[Bramblethorn]

I'm not sold on the idea that searching within tags has a benefit without a modification. What if I search for "sex" and stories with "no sex" are returned?

It's not perfect, that being an example. But overall I'm not sure exact-match only is an improvement.

I'd ask who searches for "sex" here but then I remembered what people are like. I guess somebody will.

What's the name of the site with parent and child tags that you were talking about?

For example: https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Rope Bondage

though now I check, I had the terminology wrong - seems to be "metatags" and "subtags". That system recognises BDSM -> bondage -> rope bondage -> Japanese rope bondage -> shibari and also "rope bondage" synonymous with "rope as a restraint" and many others. Rather than fixing misspellings, they just include them as synonyms. But that takes a large volunteer force of tag wranglers to define those relationships.

 

[dasgoodshit]

But overall I'm not sure exact-match only is an improvement.

I'd ask who searches for "sex" here but then I remembered what people are like. I guess somebody will.

To clarify, I wasn't suggesting that it should be an exact match, just that if the intention is to be a wildcard (partial) match, then it would be helpful for users to know what they are getting.

"Sex" was just an example. Your example would probably be more relevant. "Dominance" might return "female dominance" or "male dominance." Which one is it? The story name or description might indicate as much, but then again it might not. Currently the user has to click into the story and check the tags to find out, when the tags could easily be displayed below the description.