I had a dream that the the search function worked!

[JohnCub]

This was posted to the Acoustic Forum a couple of weeks ago by their forumite EdBega via other forumite Stackabones: Harmony Central Killer Search

 

 

Thanks for coming through with that Cobalt Blue / EdBega / Stackabones. I did a quick site search using straight up google but didn't find it was any better than a standard google search. Hopefully the guys with the hopes and dreams of searching will be able to put that to great usage!

[jamdogg]

This was posted to the Acoustic Forum a couple of weeks ago by their forumite EdBega via other forumite Stackabones: Harmony Central Killer Search

 

 

just about every time i use google to search for some HC info, I invariably end up on another site. go figure.

[jamdogg]

It isn't too much to ask. But that would mean scrapping vbulletin and going with something that's more up to the task. And we saw how that turned out.

 

 

i would argue that there are other high volume sites running vbulletin with a working search. does the gearpage qualify as a high volume site?

[JohnCub]

i would argue that there are other high volume sites running vbulletin with a working search. does the gearpage qualify as a high volume site?

 

 

http://www.thegearpage.net/board/ Threads: 229,921, Posts: 3,992,997

http://acapella.harmony-central.com/index.php Threads: 1,680,821, Posts: 27,770,874

 

 

Yes, gearpage seems to be a pretty busy site. But I don't think people realize just how busy this one is.

[jamdogg]

http://www.thegearpage.net/board/ Threads: 229,921, Posts: 3,992,997 http://acapella.harmony-central.com/index.php Threads: 1,680,821, Posts: 27,770,874 Yes, gearpage seems to be a pretty busy site. But I don't think people realize just how busy this one is.

apparently this one is in a league of its own. Touch

[jamdogg]

well maybe not go back to 2005 with the threads???

[JohnCub]

Yeah, pruning is something most forums of this nature do. Like I said before I have no idea how they do it here. But I support them. Search sucks, but my history is intact.

 

 

It's all a trade off. Search, forums, life, all of it. We lose sight of what we have for the things we want. And often when we get what we think we want we find we never really wanted it in the first place.

[Stoneball Jack]

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.

 

 

 

Ummm.....i didn't read it cause it was too long. But it's not hard. My brother 20 year old brother could fix it, and he's still in college. He builds websites on the side.

[Stoneball Jack]

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

 

 

^^this

[JohnCub]

Ummm.....i didn't read it cause it was too long. But it's not hard. My brother 20 year old brother could fix it, and he's still in college. He builds websites on the side.

 

 

Maybe you should read it. It is from the perspective of someone who is paid to create and maintain websites that are popular.

 

Or not, I don't care. Glide by. Only play the power chords; don't learn the theory... by doing that you exacerbate the issue. Either way it isn't my problem. I offered a real world explanation. If you don't want it then so be it. Keep dreaming. Otherwise read it and learn something about why it doesn't work.

[Stoneball Jack]

Maybe you should read it. It is from the perspective of someone who is paid to create and maintain websites that are popular. Or not, I don't care. Glide by. Only play the power chords; don't learn the theory... by doing that you exacerbate the issue. Either way it isn't my problem. I offered a real world explanation. If you don't want it then so be it. Keep dreaming. Otherwise read it and learn something about why it doesn't work.

Haha....cause I have to be interested in everything. Do you take the time to learn the "theory" of everything? . Music i'm interested in, computer programming not so much.

I talked to him and he said what you said makes sense but there are probably quite a few ways to make the search more efficient it. If you would like i could have him run his ideas by you and see if you think they would work. Maybe it's fixable. Maybe it's not. But it's not going to get better by people saying "it's too hard, I wish people would stop asking for stuff that's hard to do"

[Cobalt Blue]

Here's a positive aspect of "Search" not working: When "Search" did work, there were always a few Neanderthals who, whenever they deemed a question unworthy of their (very limited) knowledge, would reply with "'Search' is your friend" or with something more insulting. It's worth it not to have "Search" just so those idiots can actually be forced to be civil.

[Stoneball Jack]

Here's a positive aspect of "Search" not working: When "Search" did work, there were always a few Neanderthals who, whenever they deemed a question unworthy of their (very limited) knowledge, would reply with "'Search' is your friend" or with something more insulting. It's worth it not to have "Search" just so those idiots can actually be forced to be civil.

 

 

very true

[EADGBE]

I don't miss it. I really like the site as it is. Remember what happened the last time they tried to improve this place?

[Stoneball Jack]

BTW i didn't mean to start a thread about how it sucks that we don't have search....i really did have a dream last night that i was searching stuff lol. I just thought it was funny that i dreamed about searching

[aenemated]

listen to johncub. he's right.

 

see, searching a database is affected by more than just traffic, it also has a lot to do with a) the structure of the database b) how much content is there.

 

now, i don't know much about the specifics of vbulletin - how the db is setup, what db it's actually running on, how much power is on the db server, etc ... but there's content on this site dating back to what? the mid 90s? that's A LOT of {censored}in data.

 

think of it something like this ... you walk into a bookstore and ask an employee "i want to know every book that has the words "gibson les paul" in it. GO!"

 

again, depending on the db software, any from 1 employee to ALL of them dash off to try and find every book with "gibson les paul" in it. depending on the intelligence of stringing the query, they may even be looking for every book with any of those words in it. depending on how the bookstore is arranged and how fast all the employees are will affect how quickly they find everything.

 

in HC's case - this bookstore has a {censored}ton of books.

 

now, to further complicate things - instead of just YOU coming in to ask that, 5 other people come in at the same time and asks for something else. oh, and there's also a lot more customers picking up books by themselves, so the employee has to wait a second before he can check that whole book.

 

perhaps you're getting the idea now. you can imagine the strain put on the "employees."

 

there're a lot of variables - software, hardware, how the software is constructed - that affect how a search actually occurs; as it IS pretty intensive and moreso when there's so much data to search. in some cases (which is the case i suspect here) one of those variables - or more - just aren't efficient enough to allow a site with this much content and this many users and this much traffic to actually perform a search without bringing the whole thing down.

 

yeah, i've seen it work in the past, but it never worked very well. and, again, this is old code. and it's very possible it's been turned off because the load on the server was too great when a search was happening.

 

and moreso, you can't just migrate data to, say, a better normalization method underneath an existing codebase and expect it to just work. it won't. god knows how many queries make up this site and god knows how efficiently they were written.

 

so yeah. there ya go.

[CoqBelliqueux]

BTW i didn't mean to start a thread about how it sucks that we don't have search....i really did have a dream last night that i was searching stuff lol. I just thought it was funny that i dreamed about searching

 

 

Stop it. You want mankind to grow towards love, understanding and a greater respect for others.

[Stoneball Jack]

listen to johncub. he's right. see, searching a database is affected by more than just traffic, it also has a lot to do with a) the structure of the database b) how much content is there. now, i don't know much about the specifics of vbulletin - how the db is setup, what db it's actually running on, how much power is on the db server, etc ... but there's content on this site dating back to what? the mid 90s? that's A LOT of {censored}in data. think of it something like this ... you walk into a bookstore and ask an employee "i want to know every book that has the words "gibson les paul" in it. GO!" again, depending on the db software, any from 1 employee to ALL of them dash off to try and find every book with "gibson les paul" in it. depending on the intelligence of stringing the query, they may even be looking for every book with any of those words in it. depending on how the bookstore is arranged and how fast all the employees are will affect how quickly they find everything. in HC's case - this bookstore has a {censored}ton of books. now, to further complicate things - instead of just YOU coming in to ask that, 5 other people come in at the same time and asks for something else. oh, and there's also a lot more customers picking up books by themselves, so the employee has to wait a second before he can check that whole book. perhaps you're getting the idea now. you can imagine the strain put on the "employees." there're a lot of variables - software, hardware, how the software is constructed - that affect how a search actually occurs; as it IS pretty intensive and moreso when there's so much data to search. in some cases (which is the case i suspect here) one of those variables - or more - just aren't efficient enough to allow a site with this much content and this many users and this much traffic to actually perform a search without bringing the whole thing down. yeah, i've seen it work in the past, but it never worked very well. and, again, this is old code. and it's very possible it's been turned off because the load on the server was too great when a search was happening. and moreso, you can't just migrate data to, say, a better normalization method underneath an existing codebase and expect it to just work. it won't. god knows how many queries make up this site and god knows how efficiently they were written. so yeah. there ya go.

 

 

I understand that it's difficult and that HC faces a bigger difficulty than most but you can't honestly say it's not possible to have a high volume forum with a search function.

 

One option would be to switch to a forum type that would allow the search to work but could be themed like this one so as far as we were concerned it would be the same thing only the search would work

[Stoneball Jack]

Stop it. You want mankind to grow towards love, understanding and a greater respect for others.

 

 

Is it really too much to ask? All the worlds problems would be solved if we could all just learn to love each other

[aenemated]

I understand that it's difficult and that HC faces a bigger difficulty than most but you can't honestly say it's not possible to have a high volume forum with a search function. One option would be to switch to a forum type that would allow the search to work but could be themed like this one so as far as we were concerned it would be the same thing only the search would work

 

 

i'm only saying it's likely not possible on this platform - i suspect if it was; they'd do it. i've deployed data driven sites that got to be over 4 million rows of data and was able to implement an efficient search method. but it was built to expect that.

 

trying to just migrate it to a new platform isn't exactly a simple process if they want to retain legacy data; which i'm sure is a top priority.

[jamdogg]

Yeah, pruning is something most forums of this nature do. Like I said before I have no idea how they do it here. But I support them. Search sucks, but my history is intact. It's all a trade off. Search, forums, life, all of it. We lose sight of what we have for the things we want. And often when we get what we think we want we find we never really wanted it in the first place.

 

 

it seems somewhat daft to have so much data that can't be readily manipulated in a useful fashion. at least from an end-user perspective. i mean who cares about posts from 2005 if one must manually search through them? whats the point?

[Stoneball Jack]

what if a duplicate database was made that updated every 5 hours or so and it was put on a different server and that DB was used just for searching. Posting and stuff would be done and on one database and searches would run through the second database. That could work.