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I had a dream that the the search function worked!


Stoneball Jack

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Oh i remember a day, when it indeed worked. A day when the answers to all of life's questions were at the click of a button! And any poor child could aspire to knowledge of the most learned HC forum member! Those were the Days when heads were held high and men could search without a care in the world!

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I'll go against the grain here. I'm a programmer by trade. Not for this site or any that any of you use, but a few that get plenty of hits.

 

Writing a search engine is hard. I know it doesn't seem like it would be hard. ... actually I take it back, writing a search engine is quite easy. But it is a balancing act. A search, which has nothing to do with a web page, beats the living {censored} out of a database. Fulltext search is suboptimal no matter your db schema. It is resource intensive. So you clip its wings. You don't want a search to interfere with people seeing pages, ads being served, people posting ideas and opinions. You have to cut the search short. You do it by limiting what it searches, you do it by limiting its processor time, you do it by any means necessary. Google doesn't really have this problem, you say. Of course they don't. They have almost unlimited resources. I'd bet if google pooled their computing resources they would make the top500 supercomputers look like rookies. Harmony central is a great site but I doubt they have the capital google has.

 

Now looking at this from the perspective of this forum, built within a framework that the coders didn't write, it makes the problem even worse. The tables in the database aren't of their design. They may be suboptimal for search purposes but work great for posting. I'm sure they've done what they could with what they have and what the community outright demanded they have. I'm surprised search works _at all_ on a site as busy as this.

 

In short I'm with the programmers on this one. Search sucks. But I've never been interrupted in my postings because "We're sorry, so and so is running a search, has all the tables locked, and you'll have to retype your message when we have the ability to show you a page" message. I keep up with the current topics that meet my interest and use google to search when I want to find something specific.

 

too long, didn't read?

: I had a dream regular people understood what they ask for.

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I'll go against the grain here. I'm a programmer by trade. Not for this site or any that any of you use, but a few that get plenty of hits.


Writing a search engine is hard. I know it doesn't seem like it would be hard. ... actually I take it back, writing a search engine is quite easy. But it is a balancing act. A search, which has nothing to do with a web page, beats the living {censored} out of a database. Fulltext search is suboptimal no matter your db schema. It is resource intensive. So you clip its wings. You don't want a search to interfere with people seeing pages, ads being served, people posting ideas and opinions. You have to cut the search short. You do it by limiting what it searches, you do it by limiting its processor time, you do it by any means necessary. Google doesn't really have this problem, you say. Of course they don't. They have almost unlimited resources. I'd bet if google pooled their computing resources they would make the top500 supercomputers look like rookies. Harmony central is a great site but I doubt they have the capital google has.


Now looking at this from the perspective of this forum, built within a framework that the coders didn't write, it makes the problem even worse. The tables in the database aren't of their design. They may be suboptimal for search purposes but work great for posting. I'm sure they've done what they could with what they have and what the community outright demanded they have. I'm surprised search works _at all_ on a site as busy as this.


In short I'm with the programmers on this one. Search sucks. But I've never been interrupted in my postings because "We're sorry, so and so is running a search, has all the tables locked, and you'll have to retype your message when we have the ability to show you a page" message. I keep up with the current topics that meet my interest and use google to search when I want to find something specific.


too long, didn't read?

: I had a dream regular people understood what they ask for.

 

It worked. Now it doesn't. Fail. /thread

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how do the other popular forums getting a working search then?

 

 

by using more modern forum software that has such things better built for the kind of traffic the modern internet sees. I could be wrong here, I have no way of knowing, but I think the forums came to a grinding halt when 2.0 was released. People wanted this old dinosaur. And as much as people say a 60's gibby was the bomb we all know not every single one was. Every one had problems but it was classic nonetheless. Same story.

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It worked. Now it doesn't. Fail. /thread

 

 

Yeah, well they're also running this on "other servers" now that most of the website is running the 2.0.

 

so it isn't /thread at all. It's a reappropriation. What might have been utilized before is no longer available and we're likely running on less computing power than previous.

 

Again, this is all assumption on my part. I know how we segregate servers and assume harmony central would do things in a similar, logical manner.

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Yeah, well they're also running this on "other servers" now that most of the website is running the 2.0.


so it isn't /thread at all. It's a reappropriation. What might have been utilized before is no longer available and we're likely running on less computing power than previous.


Again, this is all assumption on my part. I know how we segregate servers and assume harmony central would do things in a similar, logical manner.

 

 

They kept 2.0 now? I thought it was back to a normal, functioning website.

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I used it with great success back in 2002.

borat_lebanon01091.jpg

The traffic was much heavier too.

 

:lol: it is pretty laughable. difficult or not, its viewed as a very basic funtion of any site. if you can't search your own site, what is that telling your traffic?

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:lol:
it is pretty laughable. difficult or not, its viewed as a very basic funtion of any site. if you can't search your own site, what is that telling your traffic?

 

Which would be worse from a user's perspective: To not be able to search or to not be able to post?

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