It's been several months since I've been to the forums...been real busy.

I came back today to search for info from a previous post (as all good net citizens should do), only to find search is now totally lame.

1. How do I search for "cruise control" in the Australian forum?

2. Where is the help link for how to construct a search phrase?

3. How to I limit results to say the last 180 days?

4. Where has the advanced search functionality gone?

5. Why would you possibly regress the functionality this badly when it was working ok after the site upgrade (you just had to know to select advanced search).

Thanks...

 

[QUOTE=scott2k,Feb 7 2006, 12:57 PM]It's been several months since I've been to the forums...been real busy.

I came back today to search for info from a previous post (as all good net citizens should do), only to find search is now totally lame.

1.

 

Scott

Try this for a solution:

At the bottom of the Oz forum, see the box "Search this forum" put +cruise +control in there.

See if that gives you results.

HTH

 

The advance search you speak of doesn't work and either returned no results or crashed the database server for a wide range of technical reasons but stemming from the method used for searching (MySQL FULLTEXT indexing) cannot cope with the large number of posts we have. It was removed because fixing it was hopeless without changing the method used to do the searching.

The only way to have it work was to reduce the functionality down to what it could handle which is searching only on the text of posts which is what we have.

[geek]
It has to do with MySQL and with how MySQL uses table indexes. MySQL can only use a single index when doing a query. When you use a FULLTEXT index to search for keywords that index must be used. All other search conditions must be satisfied by scanning the results of the FULLTEXT search and eliminating those results which don't meet the criteria. This is done for each constraint in turn until you get a final set of results.

For example, if you were to search for "cruise control" within the Austrailian forum within the past 180 days here's what would happen. First MySQL would do the FULLTEXT search on "cruise control". Given the way FULLTEXT works if you don't set the right keyword options you could get back over 1 million results. Those results would be stored in a temporary table (in RAM if small enough but probably written out to disk in 99% of the cases). That could take easily 2 or 3 minutes (and does). Once that's done that disk table is scanned top to bottom 2 times: once to remove everything that's not in the Australia forum and then again to remove everything posted over 180 days ago. Those scans could take an additional 2 to 3 minutes.

It doesn't work like you think it might. Rational thinking might deduce that it's better to fetch the smallest set of results first and then work from that. The problem is that reality dictates that MySQL can only use a single index and in the case of FULLTEXT that's the index it needs. You can't do a text search without a FULLTEXT index so all other constraints must be scanned for.

Your search is going to take probably 5 minutes. You aren't going to wait 5 minutes so you say screw this and hit the back button. You think maybe it didn't work so I'll try it again. Now you are doing two searches, the first one and now a second. When you start a query it runs to completion. It doesn't know you aren't waiting anymore and it doesn't know you got some error page. It keeps going until it's done. Because you are now doing 2 searches they both take longer. While you are doing that 4 other people also do searches. 6 searches means your first search which would have been done in 5 minutes is now going to take 25. On it goes until finally there are 25 searches running, the server is running so slowly and it so overloaded that it begins to cascade and eventually becomes completely paralised. 3 hours later when it finally starts to get some of them done it starts to visibly work again. All of this time the server has been running searches for people who will never see te results, a complete waste of time.
[/geek]

That's pretty much the final word on search. We are victims of our own success. If there was less to search through it would (and did) work better. The only way to make advanced search work is to rewrite the way searching is done and probably rewriting the way the forums stores it's post data. Since I'm the only person doing the coding/system management it would meen me stepping away from all other tasks for 6 months to a year or it would mean hiring a full time person to just write a search engine. The other option is a full scale purge of worthless, temporal, topics. A task which could take easily as long.

 

Erik, I see from time to time websites that have a tag saying "Use Google to search this site"

Knowing nothing about what you said above, is that an idea you can explore?

 

I understand your side of the issue, but honestly the search function (or lack there of) makes me not want to renew my membership to the site. The search function is absoultely useless. I'm trying to solve a problem with my Check Engine Light and I'm coming up with a topic about a meet going on in South Carolina

I'm dissapointed with the lack of technical information on this website, then again I think it's just the car. No S2000 website or forum seems to be up to par with technical information compared to other Honda/Acura forums.

Edit: What leads me to believe this is that many of the answers to technical questions are "Bring it to the dealer." I don't want to bring it to the stealership, I want to fix it myself, I just need a little help

 

Well this is a discussion forum, try to find it using the search and if you can't, ask. The problem is the nature of forums. There are 200,000 posts containing solid technical gems and 6.6 million about what people did on the weekend. That's just the way things are. Your ability to find something is directly related to the way something was explained or discussed. It's why I've been trying to revive the Home section of the site so those 200,000 or so technical topics can be cataloged and searched independently of the general noise.

You need to post your question in the right place so the right people see it and you need to do a good enough job of explaining the problem so people can answer it. If you question is "My check engine light came on, what's wrong?" then you are wasting everone's time. When you get the answer and you solve the problem let me or the moderators know so it can be added to a FAQ or posted in the Home section for other to find.