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Search engine sucks (1 Viewer)

Was trying to find this thread.

A search for "paris" didn't bring it up in the results. Neither did a search for "simpson".

:loco:
I've been saying that it has been broke for some time now.When I hit my search I no longer get an error message.

 
Something else that I brought up before:

For example, I just searched for the word "what" with the username "shuke" and it gave me no results.So I've never said the the word "what" in any post before?I have noticed multiple problems similar to this since the board was updated recently.You are correct in assuming I have nothing more important to do than talk about this right now.
 
Something else that I brought up before:

For example, I just searched for the word "what" with the username "shuke" and it gave me no results.

So I've never said the the word "what" in any post before?

I have noticed multiple problems similar to this since the board was updated recently.

You are correct in assuming I have nothing more important to do than talk about this right now.
You know.... you might want to try getting the quote function down before you move on to something as advanced as me. :unsure:

 
Well, I've played around with it a bit, and here's what I think the issue is.

If you search the entire board for:

Paris

Using the default Advanced Search page with the default options, the following post should appear as a search result:

http://forums.footballguys.com/forum/index...opic=163570&hl=

However, it does not appear in the list. But when you do the same search from the default Simple Search page with the default options, the post above does appear as a search result as it should.

One thing I have noticed is in the Advanced Search for Paris, the following text appears next to the page counter at the top of the screen:

(Search results limited to first 1000)

However, when you run the same search through Simple Search, the result info that appears at the top of the page is:

Results 0 - 25 of about 1990.

So I figure that what is happening is that the result recordset is getting truncated in Advanced Search and the missing posts are part of the group that got truncated to bring the result set down to 1,000 posts. Even though the missing post was created yesterday, depending on the parameters of the query, it could be getting truncated -- there's no guarantee that the Advanced Search returns the most recent 1,000 matching posts, even though that would be the way I would do it.

The Simple Search screen apparently is not subject to the same 1,000 message cap as advanced search, though, so it can return everything including the word "Paris".

This would also explain why the more specific searches work while the more general ones do not -- for example, "+Paris +Simpson" is able to return the missing thread in question because the number of results for that searches is well below 1,000 posts, so you get the whole recordset back.

So I have put in a support ticket/bug report with Invision to see what they have to say about this. In the meantime, though, you will probably want to use the Simple Search to do your searching for popular terms that will probably return more than 1,000 results.

(I would re-enable Simple Search as the primary search engine but I seem to recall a great disturbance in the Force the last time I switched the default engine out.)

 
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Not the same issue, but I've always wondered why we can't search for words with 3 characters or less? What about NFL, positions (not those kind, football ones - RB, WR, QB, etc.)? the movie SAW thread was a pain in the *** for me to find since you couldn't search for saw.Anyone explain this?

 
Not the same issue, but I've always wondered why we can't search for words with 3 characters or less? What about NFL, positions (not those kind, football ones - RB, WR, QB, etc.)? the movie SAW thread was a pain in the *** for me to find since you couldn't search for saw.

Anyone explain this?
Yep -- that's a limitation in the MySQL fulltext search engine. Searching for words shorter than 4 characters is not allowed by the software. Not much that can be done about that, unfortunately. The reason is that the shorter the word, the greater the number of potential results returned by the search. The way it is explained on the tech sites is that by reducing the number of search characters to 2, they would increase the required size of the fulltext index by 100x or more. This would have the effect of making all fulltext searches take much longer, no matter how many characters were searched on. So it's basically a tradeoff to sacrifice some functionality in order to make the majority of requests run faster.The same thing is true for shuke's other question above about him searching for the word 'what' and getting no results. MySQL has a "noise words" filter that removes very common words from the index so that it doesn't get bogged down in searches that will return huge numbers of results. 'What' is one of those words.

Sorry man.

 
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Well, I've played around with it a bit, and here's what I think the issue is.

If you search the entire board for:

Paris

Using the default Advanced Search page with the default options, the following post should appear as a search result:

http://forums.footballguys.com/forum/index...opic=163570&hl=

However, it does not appear in the list. But when you do the same search from the default Simple Search page with the default options, the post above does appear as a search result as it should.

One thing I have noticed is in the Advanced Search for Paris, the following text appears next to the page counter at the top of the screen:

(Search results limited to first 1000)

However, when you run the same search through Simple Search, the result info that appears at the top of the page is:

Results 0 - 25 of about 1990.

So I figure that what is happening is that the result recordset is getting truncated in Advanced Search and the missing posts are part of the group that got truncated to bring the result set down to 1,000 posts. Even though the missing post was created yesterday, depending on the parameters of the query, it could be getting truncated -- there's no guarantee that the Advanced Search returns the most recent 1,000 matching posts, even though that would be the way I would do it.

The Simple Search screen apparently is not subject to the same 1,000 message cap as advanced search, though, so it can return everything including the word "Paris".

This would also explain why the more specific searches work while the more general ones do not -- for example, "+Paris +Simpson" is able to return the missing thread in question because the number of results for that searches is well below 1,000 posts, so you get the whole recordset back.

So I have put in a support ticket/bug report with Invision to see what they have to say about this. In the meantime, though, you will probably want to use the Simple Search to do your searching for popular terms that will probably return more than 1,000 results.

(I would re-enable Simple Search as the primary search engine but I seem to recall a great disturbance in the Force the last time I switched the default engine out.)
Can I get the Cliffs notes version please.
 
Well, I've played around with it a bit, and here's what I think the issue is.

If you search the entire board for:

Paris

Using the default Advanced Search page with the default options, the following post should appear as a search result:

http://forums.footballguys.com/forum/index...opic=163570&hl=

However, it does not appear in the list. But when you do the same search from the default Simple Search page with the default options, the post above does appear as a search result as it should.

One thing I have noticed is in the Advanced Search for Paris, the following text appears next to the page counter at the top of the screen:

(Search results limited to first 1000)

However, when you run the same search through Simple Search, the result info that appears at the top of the page is:

Results 0 - 25 of about 1990.

So I figure that what is happening is that the result recordset is getting truncated in Advanced Search and the missing posts are part of the group that got truncated to bring the result set down to 1,000 posts. Even though the missing post was created yesterday, depending on the parameters of the query, it could be getting truncated -- there's no guarantee that the Advanced Search returns the most recent 1,000 matching posts, even though that would be the way I would do it.

The Simple Search screen apparently is not subject to the same 1,000 message cap as advanced search, though, so it can return everything including the word "Paris".

This would also explain why the more specific searches work while the more general ones do not -- for example, "+Paris +Simpson" is able to return the missing thread in question because the number of results for that searches is well below 1,000 posts, so you get the whole recordset back.

So I have put in a support ticket/bug report with Invision to see what they have to say about this. In the meantime, though, you will probably want to use the Simple Search to do your searching for popular terms that will probably return more than 1,000 results.

(I would re-enable Simple Search as the primary search engine but I seem to recall a great disturbance in the Force the last time I switched the default engine out.)
Can I get the Cliffs notes version please.
He said that the search engine sucked.
 
Not the same issue, but I've always wondered why we can't search for words with 3 characters or less? What about NFL, positions (not those kind, football ones - RB, WR, QB, etc.)? the movie SAW thread was a pain in the *** for me to find since you couldn't search for saw.

Anyone explain this?
Yep -- that's a limitation in the MySQL fulltext search engine. Searching for words shorter than 4 characters is not allowed by the software. Not much that can be done about that, unfortunately. The reason is that the shorter the word, the greater the number of potential results returned by the search. The way it is explained on the tech sites is that by reducing the number of search characters to 2, they would increase the required size of the fulltext index by 100x or more. This would have the effect of making all fulltext searches take much longer, no matter how many characters were searched on. So it's basically a tradeoff to sacrifice some functionality in order to make the majority of requests run faster.The same thing is true for shuke's other question above about him searching for the word 'what' and getting no results. MySQL has a "noise words" filter that removes very common words from the index so that it doesn't get bogged down in searches that will return huge numbers of results. 'What' is one of those words.

Sorry man.
Now that it's been explained, that makes sense (and I think I remember reading that somewhere before) I think you can get "around" this limitation by including a 3 letter word in a phrase in quotes (if you know the phrase it's likely to be in)
 
Can I get the Cliffs notes version please.
I reported it as a bug to the maker of the software. This problem only seems to affect the 'Advanced Search', which is the board default. So you may want to use 'Simple Search' to be sure not to miss anything important until I hear back from the software people.
 
Can I get the Cliffs notes version please.
I reported it as a bug to the maker of the software. This problem only seems to affect the 'Advanced Search', which is the board default. So you may want to use 'Simple Search' to be sure not to miss anything important until I hear back from the software people.
Do you work here?Anyway, I played around with the amount of time to do the search. I think when the results are over 1000, it doesn't truncate the results by date, it uses some other criteria.

If the results are less than 1000, then the thread showed up.

 
Can I get the Cliffs notes version please.
I reported it as a bug to the maker of the software. This problem only seems to affect the 'Advanced Search', which is the board default. So you may want to use 'Simple Search' to be sure not to miss anything important until I hear back from the software people.
Do you work here?Anyway, I played around with the amount of time to do the search. I think when the results are over 1000, it doesn't truncate the results by date, it uses some other criteria.

If the results are less than 1000, then the thread showed up.
Yes -- I'm pretty much the tech guy for FBG. The default parameter for MySQL fulltext search is "strongest match" -- so the default order for search results has to do with how many times the word is included in the thread. But what they should then be doing is sorting the results by date, newest first, before truncating them to 1,000 threads. Or just don't truncate the number of results; the simple search returns them all so why make the advanced search different?No word from Invision yet. I'll post back when I hear something.

 
BTW, anyone looking for more search options - go to Google and search for your search term plus:

site:http://forums.footballguys.com/forum/

Lets you use the power of Google to search the FBG forums. You may not get the absolutely latests posts, but they must crawl here relatively often and crawl pretty deep also.

 
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It's always been the achilles heel to these impressive boards. No clue why Invision can write a script for great boards but the search stinks. Memphis, why don't you just axe their whole shpeal and write your own search query from scratch?

 
Not the same issue, but I've always wondered why we can't search for words with 3 characters or less? What about NFL, positions (not those kind, football ones - RB, WR, QB, etc.)? the movie SAW thread was a pain in the *** for me to find since you couldn't search for saw.

Anyone explain this?
Yep -- that's a limitation in the MySQL fulltext search engine. Searching for words shorter than 4 characters is not allowed by the software. Not much that can be done about that, unfortunately. The reason is that the shorter the word, the greater the number of potential results returned by the search. The way it is explained on the tech sites is that by reducing the number of search characters to 2, they would increase the required size of the fulltext index by 100x or more. This would have the effect of making all fulltext searches take much longer, no matter how many characters were searched on. So it's basically a tradeoff to sacrifice some functionality in order to make the majority of requests run faster.The same thing is true for shuke's other question above about him searching for the word 'what' and getting no results. MySQL has a "noise words" filter that removes very common words from the index so that it doesn't get bogged down in searches that will return huge numbers of results. 'What' is one of those words.

Sorry man.
What about this?
The default value of minimum character length (which is 4) can be modified. It's #defined as ft_min_word_len at myisam/ft_static.c of you sources.

Of course you can always use mysql variables (read http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/Fulltext_Fine-tuning.html)
The minimum and maximum lengths of words to be indexed are defined by the ft_min_word_len and ft_max_word_len system variables. (See Section 5.2.2, “Server System Variables”.) The default minimum value is four characters; the default maximum is version dependent. If you change either value, you must rebuild your FULLTEXT indexes. For example, if you want three-character words to be searchable, you can set the ft_min_word_len variable by putting the following lines in an option file:

[mysqld]

ft_min_word_len=3
 
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Agree. I was trying to find an old story I once told on here about passing out in a Port-A-John and couldn't find it. Maybe it was my own ineptitude, but I tried a number of catch words I knew I would have used (passed, Port-A-John, Flaming Gorge, etc..), and couldn't find it.

 
Not the same issue, but I've always wondered why we can't search for words with 3 characters or less? What about NFL, positions (not those kind, football ones - RB, WR, QB, etc.)? the movie SAW thread was a pain in the *** for me to find since you couldn't search for saw.

Anyone explain this?
"The Saw" is in the sticky thread at the top. Granted, the link is bad though.
 
Was just saying this last night. When searched for the thread to complain about it of course nothing showed up.

 
If you really want to find something use google. searchstring site:forums.footballguys.com

 
If you really want to find something use google. searchstring site:forums.footballguys.com
I just type footballguys and whatever I'm looking for. Usually works.

But still an indictment on the awful search function here.

 
The search engine may suck but at least we have plenty of space where out mailboxes aren't constantly overloaded.

 

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