The Vocal Search

Introduction

This is really a series of random observations on trying to find stories and creators on Vocal, and the obvious musical introduction is "Searchin'" by The Coasters.

I do have issues with the Vocal search option but it also can do a lot for you as long as you use it correctly and within its ability borders.

So The Vocal Search Pros And Cons

I think initially I would search for a title or for an author but very often the results bore little resemblance to what I was actually looking for. Many times I found that just using Google with more specific search terms was actually more reliable than the Vocal search.

My main problem is that I have over 1,250 Vocal stories and I often forget the actual titles to search for.

I then discovered that if you search for a phrase that is in the story text, the Vocal search will bring back stories that contain that text.

For instance, and I hope this continues to work, but maybe one day something will change and it might stop. I was looking for a poem I had written about my favourite Facebook Vocal Groups and couldn't, for the life of me, remember the title (it's at the end of this story), so I thought, I know Vocal Social Society is mentioned in there so I will put that into the Vocal search bar.

Below is what came back, click on the link/image to see.

The first ten are mine, because that phrase was in the text, although a few mention it in the title or subtitles. Ironically the poem I was looking for wasn't there.

This is a powerful tool to have when you want to search for things although, like when you search on a normal search engine, you have to get the search words right.

I would love to be able to search on a particular community or author page.

Communities do not have filters bar Top Stories, Latest Stories and collections although you can manually filter if you know the subcommunity you want to look through. If a story has a subcommunity (tag) it is shown at the end of that story. Clicking on that link will take you to that community.

This is sci-fi in Fiction:

You can see the button I clicked to get it here.

I think it would be useful to have these filters at the top of the community plus a search box just for that community with the selected filter on. Please do this Vocal.

They do have subcommunity filters on the main Communities page, but we need this on individual community pages

On a creator page, you can filter their stories but you cannot search just their page.

You can add their name to your Vocal search but that is about it. Sometimes you are lucky and get what you are looking for, but other times it is a manual exercise to go through page by page and hope that you find what you are looking for.

I used the phrase "Mikeydred Summer" and a lot of my stories came up, some with "Summer" in the title and, no doubt, all of them with "Summer" in the text. The search is below.

Try it yourself and see if you can find what you are looking for.

Concluding The Search

I hope you have found this informative. The Vocal Search is not perfect but it is powerful and a lot of past failings have been eradicated.

There are some workarounds you need to do for certain things, but I do believe these will continue to improve as we move forward with Vocal.

If you have any tips or suggestions please let us know in the comments on this post or feel free to contact me on Facebook.

I will close this with the poem that I couldn't find. I often add it to Vocal related posts so that is another route I can take to find things.

So I hope this has helped and these are a few of my favourite Vocal related Facebook Groups in the form of a poem for you. All these are worth joining if you are not a member yet.