I joined this community shorty after the new website was launched, so I assumed that my difficulties searching Sutta Central were due to a mixture of newbie ignorance and continuing site development. However, I am baffled that after reading Javier’s recent post about translating the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta I couldn’t find an appropriate result for ‘Dhammacakkappavattana’ (screenshot below). I had no trouble doing so on Access to Insight, where I retrieved the number SN56.11, which worked fine on SC and gave me access to Sujato’s and Bodhi’s translations of the same.
I’m using Chrome, as advised, on a Macbook Pro and/or iPad with the same experience on each device. I have read other threads on the search function but can someone tell me if I’m missing something obvious please?
Okay so you so D&D—which is this forum—but the screenshot is for SuttaCentral, i.e. the main site. So I’ll assume that’s what we’re talking about.
The search on SC is great and solves a lot of hard problems, but it is far from perfect and often misses out on things that should be obvious. We have a long list of improvements for it, which I urgently want to focus on, and you can find here:
As for this specific case, the problem here is that the search looks for whole words, and in the relevant sutta, it appears only in the title compounded as Dhammacakkappavattanasutta.
So as a general tip, if you don’t get the word you’re looking for, chop a letter or two off the end and add an asterisk. This finds the sutta, although it is still at the bottom of the list, so it should be prioritized at the top.
Search is hard! Google has gotten so good that it makes us think it should all be just there. Anyway, we’ll make it better.
Thank you for taking the time, and for the suggestion. I’m afraid I forgot the basic operators some time ago. Learning more Pali will probably help too.
As an extension of your point, Javier, I thought I’d mention the option of a site search, ie. enter eg. site:suttacentral.net Dhammacakkappavattana into the search field and result will be restricted content on the given site.
