search feature broken?

[ixfd64]

The search feature has been having more and more problems. I know that it ignores common words such as "the", etc, but it seems to only return a portion of results.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For example, Andrew posted a topic called "I apologize" a long time ago, and the search feature can no longer find it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Also, I know for a fact that some players' names, such as Zzzamorak and Aaron11144 have been mentioned on the forums, but searching now return no results.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Please look into this.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks.

[Dragontotem]

Well, all i can say is that perhaps the post Andrew wrote has already gone trough the last page which leads to posts deletion.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Also, same is with Zzz's post, if his post has gone to last page and further, it will be deleted.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I think

[Cruiser]

Well, all i can say is that perhaps the post Andrew wrote has already gone trough the last page which leads to posts deletion.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

phpBB doesn't have a last page monster like the Jagex boards. Even topics that appear to be deleted usually have only been moved out of public view by the staff (as said by admins and others in the past).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As for the search being broken, it's been known for a while. phpBB's search just sucks in general so there's no surprise it didn't bring up a topic that's months old.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A lookup of Andrews forum account via the memberlist shows a post count of 6, 3 of which are still public.

[Dragontotem]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

phpBB doesn't have a last page monster like the Jagex boards. Even topics that appear to be deleted usually have only been moved out of public view by the staff (as said by admins and others in the past).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oh, okay, didn't know that. Thanks for telling that :D

[____]

As for the search being broken, it's been known for a while. phpBB's search just sucks in general so there's no surprise it didn't bring up a topic that's months old.

Albosky also cleaned up the search tables a while ago - which would account for some topics which are faily old not being found; unless he fully restored the tables :-?

[Albosky]

I'll explain it ONE LAST TIME.....

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The search feature marks any word found in more then 40% of the posts as "common" and will not return the results of those posts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When a post is made , the search function strips all BBCode from the message.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It then separates all the words in the post.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then it strips all non-alphanumeric characters out of the words (only a-z A-Z 1-9 are kept)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It then removes any words that contain 3 or more consistent characters (hence why ZZZamorak and Aaron11144 were not found)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now it moves on and removes all words that are less then 4 characters long or greater then 16 characters long.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The words that are left are then stored along with the corresponding post id number for search results.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you are looking for posts by a specific author, use the author search, don't search for their name as a keyword.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Theres no possible way I could allow every single character to be entered into the search tables. Theres over 1.8 million active posts, each with an average of 20-30 words. That would result in over 45 million entries needing to be sorted through every time a user tried to search the forums.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On top of the absolute annoying strain on the database, you would end up with so many results that its almost definite that nothing you wanted to read will actually be found in those results.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BE SPECIFIC when you search , use multiple words, use the author search , choose the forum/category you want to search , use the title only search , etc etc etc...

[ixfd64]

It does get incovenient, though.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I could use Google search ("stuff site:tip.it") but the thing is, Google doesn't index every single post, and posts are not indexed by Google as soon as they are made. :(