I've noticed in recent cuts that the search functions on 64 bit builds uses Google to search the help on the sidefx site, instead of the internal search. Someone just told me that 32 builds don't seem to exhibit this behavior.

Bug? Feature?

Cheers,

J.C.

I sent support a mail about this. But could not find the toggle in the help

Please make sure that you have Houdini9.5 Online Help toggled on, rather than Web Search (it should be under the search field).

Rob

I suspect the option “should” be here but it appears to be missing, its the screwdriver icon, three over from the address bar.

This was a test we were doing in our next version that ended up in 9.5 by accident. It will be put back to the old search as soon as possible. The test was designed to explore whether a google-based search offered faster and more accurate results.

Any feedback would be great to help with explorations in this area!

First thoughts:

1. You get a lot more results, which can be good.

2. I've found so far that there's a lot less ‘focus’ to the results. I understand that getting everything indexed to be relevant is a lot of work and there's been criticisms of certain key items getting no results at all, but when the built-in search *does* work, it's pretty sweet. I get a lot of very relevant results with the custom search rather than googly. I guess it's the ol' human brain vs algorithm thing personified.

3. Ads.

Cheers,

J.C.

My biggest problem with the Google based on is that the link titles are really hard to parse.

Searching for ‘cookie’ gives me this as a link name….

#type: node #context: sop #internal: cookie #icon: SOP/cookie …

I'd much rather see

Cookie SOP


another example is….
I know there is a VEX function for looking up primitive attributes but I can't remember what the function is called. So using the help I search for “VEX primitive attribute”, it finds the function I want, but its on the second page at the very bottom.

(Then again, I suck with Google searches)

I am not seeing that toggle at all on the latest OSX build. The internal search when it works is great. I also liked the suggestions when you typed in the search bar ( very helpful ) for those of us who cannot spell which seems to of also gone.

Rob

According to Rob's post above, you are stuck with the google search until they fix Houdini 9.5 in a later build. The google search was only supposed to be in a future version of Houdini, 9.x or 10.