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jayjay
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 09, 2005 1:09 pm    Post subject: Boolean search does not work Reply with quote

The AND, OR and NOT keywords in the search form don't work! Why?

In the comment of the search is written:
Quote:

Search for Keywords:
You can use AND to define words which must be in the results, OR to define words which may be in the result and NOT to define words which should not be in the result. Use * as a wildcard for partial matches


Example:
    Search "xfs" = 164 Results
    Search "raid" = 151 Results
    Search "xfs AND raid" = 201 Results
    Search "xfs raid" with Option "Search for all terms" = 201 Results

So it's very difficult to find helpful entries.

Cheers JJ
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kalle2
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PostPosted: Mon Feb 21, 2005 11:41 pm    Post subject: i have the same problem - not a user problem - very anoying Reply with quote

hi,

i have the same problem, so i am glad it is not my own fault.
i have been looking for an explaination yesterday and today, but it's hard to search without a working search function.
(i just wanted to post a similar example with the keywords root sound properties)

kalle
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chrib
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 23, 2005 7:40 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Correct me if I'm wrong, but "and" is in the search stopword list. I think that the list is not case-sensitive and that AND is filtered out.
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ian!
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 23, 2005 8:33 am    Post subject: Re: Boolean search does not work Reply with quote

jayjay wrote:
The AND, OR and NOT keywords in the search form don't work! Why?

In the comment of the search is written:
Quote:

Search for Keywords:
You can use AND to define words which must be in the results, OR to define words which may be in the result and NOT to define words which should not be in the result. Use * as a wildcard for partial matches

I know. That's kinda confusing.

We disabled boolean search due to performance problems a while back. I'll have a look at it soon.
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kalle2
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 23, 2005 4:20 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

ok...
but then the (very reasonable) hint: "Do a search before you post a question" is obsolete because searches for one Word mostly produce hundreds of results...
So I am looking forward for a fix because I really like this forum...

chrib, AND does not work either.

best regards
kalle
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pjp
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 23, 2005 9:34 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

kalle2 wrote:
but then the (very reasonable) hint: "Do a search before you post a question" is obsolete because searches for one Word mostly produce hundreds of results...
Multiple word searches are still valid, and much more useful than single word searches.
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kalle2
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PostPosted: Sun Feb 27, 2005 12:40 pm    Post subject: Multiple searches are *not* valid Reply with quote

> Multiple word searches are still valid, [...]

Sorry, but they are not.

"alsa":157 results
"devfs": 194 results
"alsa devfs": 236 results
That's definitly not a working multiple word search!
236 can not mean that 236 results contain "alsa" AND "devfs" - that could only be 157 (if every page with "alsa" also contains "devfs")
236 results - no matter if "Search for any terms or use query as entered" or "Search for all terms" is checked...

what does it mean?
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kallamej
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PostPosted: Sun Feb 27, 2005 5:39 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

kalle2 wrote:
what does it mean?

That the search only returns a small fraction of the threads. You are probably better off searching individual forums. For instance, searching for 'alsa' in Portage & Programming gives me 203 matches, whilst 'alsa devfs' yields only 17.
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j-m
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PostPosted: Sun Feb 27, 2005 6:29 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

kallamej wrote:
kalle2 wrote:
what does it mean?

That the search only returns a small fraction of the threads. .


OK. Then you need to reindex and if that does not fix the problem, then it would be necessary to start some debugging. The search is obviously broken now.
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Earthwings
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PostPosted: Sun Feb 27, 2005 6:45 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Afaik searching produces temporary tables which are limited in size to prevent too high load. That could cause the different results. The search is not necessarily broken due to the fact that it returns a non-intuitive number of results. If some hits are cut at the end, it doesn't really matter.
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PostPosted: Sun Feb 27, 2005 6:51 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Earthwings wrote:
If some hits are cut at the end, it doesn't really matter.


I do not want to rant but this sounds, errr, funny. Search which returns random number of results depending on the system load is not quite that much useful. Otherwise, peace. :)
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Earthwings
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PostPosted: Sun Feb 27, 2005 7:00 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

You got that quite wrong. I didn't say the number of results depends on the system load. I said the size of temporary tables is limited (to a fixed size) to prevent that system load / memory usage gets too high when calculating huge tables. I know another phpbb based forum that uses a non-patched search function - the temporary search tables get that big that processes have to be killed via a cron job to leave the forum in a working state.
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kalle2
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PostPosted: Mon Feb 28, 2005 3:36 pm    Post subject: give'em a hint Reply with quote

Well, apart from all technical issues there should be a hint for this on the search page.
I think the huge amounts of threads in this forum has something to do with the fact that the search is ......
ok, let's say you have to get used to it.
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Earthwings
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PostPosted: Mon Feb 28, 2005 5:09 pm    Post subject: Re: give'em a hint Reply with quote

kalle2 wrote:
Well, apart from all technical issues there should be a hint for this on the search page.
I think the huge amounts of threads in this forum has something to do with the fact that the search is ......
ok, let's say you have to get used to it.

It's covered in the faq, but I agree that a warning when searching for illegal terms (or just removing them automagically) would be a useful addition.
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thebigslide
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PostPosted: Fri Mar 04, 2005 8:44 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

By what means/algorhythm is the search working on right now? It seems to looks for all search terms at any place in / thread. I'd like to help fix it. thebigslide_at_gmail.com. I just started working nights and have 8/hrs a day to commit to this :)
I'm playing with phpbb right now and found some quick hacks... Esp because this is a support forum and certain things are searched for time and again, it would help to index frequent searches in a mysql database. Also, it would be simple to add a 'Did this help you" button to bump helpful search results in the listing w/o adding too much extra bulk to the db. Another way of increasing the match rate is by including buttons that only moderators see for 'cruft post/helpful post' to keep items from be indexed and bump others. A third thought it that right now, search results only returns the name of the thread and not the post ID. This is ass backwards and makes it more difficult to index searches.
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kallamej
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PostPosted: Fri Mar 04, 2005 9:56 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

thebigslide wrote:
A third thought it that right now, search results only returns the name of the thread and not the post ID. This is ass backwards and makes it more difficult to index searches.

Ehm, ever tried Display results as: Posts?
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thebigslide
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PostPosted: Fri Mar 04, 2005 10:19 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

apparently not :P
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masseya
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PostPosted: Fri Mar 04, 2005 4:48 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Now that the forums URLs are Google-friendly, if you don't like the way the forums search engine works, you have an alternative. However, I have personally found the Forums search engine to be very useful. A lot of changes have been made to allow the forums search engine to search effeciently and accurately. The bottom line is that it's never going to return results as you would expect Google to return them. Well, let me re-phrase that. It's only going to return results as you would expect Google to return them if/when we get a multimillion dollar search engine farm. Anyhow, w/o further ado:

Googling alsa and devfs for the Gentoo Forums.
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jayjay
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 29, 2005 5:21 pm    Post subject: Performance Problems Reply with quote

So I can understand, that it is not possible to boolean search in the
gentoo forum, because the server/server farm is too weak and the
gentoo project can not afford better performance.

What i can not understand is:
Why is there still the old text in the search form and not a text, that
explains how to search? Why there is no Google search field beside
the quick search field, that generates an google search.

It's not because of me, but it's about the hundreds of users, that try to
search the forum and don't get the right information.

Cheers JJ
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PostPosted: Mon Jun 06, 2005 10:02 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

My experience is that a unary search is broken.

Today, when I used the search page, in its default state,
using one term []network[] yields zero results.

However, using two terms, []network ethernet[] yields many results.

:-\
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Earthwings
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PostPosted: Mon Jun 06, 2005 10:11 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

network is in the stopword-list, therefore you don't get results when searching for it.
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PostPosted: Mon Jun 06, 2005 10:32 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

That was very helpful. Thank you.

So I suppose search is only broken in the eye of the beholder who did not read the documentation. :)
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