Gentoo forum search sucks

[tekknokrat]

I am in this thread were this guys talks about his wife, thunderbird and prefs.js tuning.
I take these 2 keywords (no not "wife thunderbird" but "thunderbird prefs.js") for a quick search with option

[yabbadabbadont]

As has been posted many many times, the forums search is very limited (currently, they are working on a new version). Your best bet is to use google with "site:forums.gentoo.org"

Edit: see the following threads, one of which is a sticky, for details.

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-223530.html
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-33345.html
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[desultory]

Merged the prior two posts.

[tekknokrat]

When I saw my topic title in "your posts" I thought to myself

[no_hope]

Is there a way to donate money specifically for forum improvement (beefier servers or whatnot)? I can't contribute that much, but I use the forums search feature enough to be compelled to donate some money for its improvement. I'd think I am not the only one in such position.

[nixnut]

merged some posts here.
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Please add [solved] to the initial post's subject line if you feel your problem is resolved. Help answer the unanswered

talk is cheap. supply exceeds demand

[Cinquero]

1.) Use some full-text indexer like swish.

2.) What sense does it make to allow one to only search the message body but not just the message's subject line? The most relevant hits should be due to the subject, not the body -- the latter one gives a lot of mis-hits...

3.) If searching via Google is better, why not adding a "search via Google" field?

4.) And yes, search functionality *really* sucks.

[Uncle_Psychosis]

I'm not about to read the whole thread, but I find that google is great for searching the gentoo forums. For instance, earlier I wanted to search for a specific mouse, the Logitech G5.

Go to google and type, for example:

logitech G5 site:forums.gentoo.org

Sam

[juanpaul]

What is happening whit the search of this forum?
Even more word i put on the search, even more imprecise i get the results:

At this moment, if a search for chroot will return 137 matches.
But if i search for chroot uname i got 247 matches. (i've tried again with chroot AND uname, and got the same 247 results)

Where is the "Search for all terms"? I can't find this.

[ralkema]

I just stumbled on this topic, and I have a tip for searching this forum,
what I usually do is use Google, and then I add

[kernelOfTruth]

[cokey]

Personally I trust tomk more than i do google
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[dingfelder]

I am looking for posts that contain xorg-server-1.4

if I search for that using the quick search, it replaces xorg-server-1.4 with xorgserver1.4 which is meaningless

[didymos]

Yeah, the search sucks. That's a well-known fact. Use google and have it search just forums.gentoo.org.
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Thomas S. Howard

[nixnut]

merged above two posts here.
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Please add [solved] to the initial post's subject line if you feel your problem is resolved. Help answer the unanswered

talk is cheap. supply exceeds demand

[hurricane]

Hello, i know this could be seen as a duplicate is some weird way, but i'm trying to adress this worst of all problems on the forum in a way so solve it *finally* for all of us. This is a large difference from just talking and talking without actually doing something.

The problem - a little horror story:
My theory - that i honestly believe in - is that the net result of the search feature as it is right now - is pure sadism, because:
Some apparently misguided guy created a blacklist for all those most frequently used words, because they use the most resources. You know what? Those are also the things poeple SEARCH FRICKIN' THE MOST! Seriously! Here's a perfect example from right now:

1. I was interested in finding the best and most to-the-edge install-guide to use for my new workstation.
2. I went to the forum and entered "best install guide" inte the quicksearch.
3. The search removes the terms "best" and "install", leaving me with the search result for "guide"... WTF?? this takes up MORE resources by filtering out less and pushing out more. and additionally, this whole search was COMPLETELY USELESS, so i have to discard it.
4. I'm thinking "hmm... maybe there's a deeper sense in this?" let's search for that.
5. I enter "forum search useless" in the quick search.
6. Well. at least i get "search useless". and that pretty much describes those results too. I'm not getting ONE title containig "search" and "useless". i guess some other madman ORed the words, like back in 1990, when the problem were too few results instead of too much.
7. Looking at the detail search i can see that it is impossible to search in the titles only.
8. I'm doing a "forum AND search AND useless" (Why not use "&" [even "&&" would be better] instead of "AND" like healthy poeple? I have no idea...).
9. Ok, i'll give it up. seems like i have to do it oldstyle and use Strg-F to search in the pages for those (non-highlighted) words. Thank the unknown plugin developer for firefox's highlight feature.)
10. Oh wonders. I found a thread called "Gentoo forum search sucks". ... I'm... i'm... home...
11. Disillusion. There is just blah blah in there. Ranting. Contra-ranting. Anti-ranting. Anti-contra-ranting... and so on. Good and bad arguments. But. NOTHING happened since.
12. Now we're here.

Additionally the very important (and very specific) search for version numbers does not work too! Guys, this is no "my first website" (portal) of an aol-user. We need professional grade search functions to cope with the sheer mass of postings. By that i mean: version numbers, command line syntax (think google code search), intelligent expressions (boolean or even better perl regex [mysql has functions for this!] [on request]), a possibility to search in all fields (let the user do a miltiple-choice) of a posting.


The solution - a to do list:

a) FINALLY switch that search to default to AND!
b) Make AND actually work. (see point 6)
c) REMOVE that wtf-wordlist forever, Saving yourself some traffic and us some hairs from being pulled out, oh, and you from reading such posts as mine (I can see the resource problem when using OR. But if you can't handle the load, let google do it with "site:forums.gentoo.org some search terms". At least that one gets the AND right. Or even better: Fix the real problem [=defaulting to OR] instead of inventing some perverse "solution" to the symptoms)
d) Additionally index all "/((?:\w+-)?([0-9]+\.)+(?:\sbuild.[0-9]+)?)/i" and let users search for them.
e) Guarantee a full boolean + wildcard search syntax.
f) add a list (multi-<select>) to the advanced search page, containing all fields of a post. If the field is not usable with search terms (dates, numbers?) add a separate <input> field for it.
Optionally:
g) Add a syntax search mode, where you can enter things you could enter in bash or see in logs.
h) Add a perl-compatible-regex search mode, for very specific searches.
h) Disable the slow features by default, but let the users choose (add info "only if you know what you do and need it" in case it gets used too much)

Aaand... ACTION!:
I know you all work on voluntary basis or for a company that wants to see "results" (meaning money, and unfortunately not some morally important values), so i can not expect you to fix it. I can only eiter
a) Ask you nicely to yo something great for our community, get our respect and boost gentoo's adoption by making it easier to get help and therefore easyer to use gentoo.
or
b) Ask you to let me access the source, so that i can 1. fix and 2. tune the search, and get that respect myself. (Plus saving some hair No love for you then. )


So please: This is for you, forum search mainainers:
Answer me... or better yet: us... so we can be happy again.


P.S.: Yes, my english is not the best. But arguing with that is false logic (ad hominem) an does nothing to my arguments. (Btw. I'm speaking letzeburgesch [luxemburgish] and deutsch [german] perfectly, and français [french] is ok too... so why not talk that and see how well your grammar is?
P.P.S.: Thas was written in the affect of the agryness created by using the search. Therefore it might contain some unintended errors in logic (that i hope you will tell me of). The reason i did it anyways is to let you feel how mad that problem really makes your users. (I'm by far not he only one. Two of my colleages stopped using the search alltogether and use google for it now.) So please don't downplay it and do not deliberately use false logic or something similar to get rid of it. (Of course you are free to dump your own emotions here if they owerwhelm you. I can handle that.

[mark_alec]

Merged above.

A new search engine is in the works.
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[hurricane]

[pilla]

[Steffen]

You should take a look Sphinx: http://www.sphinxsearch.com/

It searches through our 1,5 GB posts in a few milliseconds and even indexes single letters. The drawbacks are that it does not support the wildcard operator * and the index has to be recreated periodically (but this happens at ridiculous speed).

Some benchmarks are here: http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/files/presentations/EuroOSCON2006-High-Performance-FullText-Search.pdf

[jshanab]

What is up with the search on this forum. No matter what I enter it stirps it down to one word and comes up with 100's of pages. Then If I do find a multipage hit, I have to manully search each page myself, the engine doesn't take me anywhere close. I think it use to work before the "crash"
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ghidra: 2.6.18-gentoo-r3 x86_64 AMD64 with xfce4 across 2 monitors; reiserfs on LVM2
hamal: Gentoo 2.6.16-gentoo-r4, athlonxp 1600 with gnome,reiserfs, LVM2.
jeffnote Gentoo 2.6.20-suspend2-r?, IBM T22
HTC_apache: Next convert, my ppc6700 phone

[bunder]

merged above post.

jshanab, you may be interested in the stoplist, a list of words that get exempted from forum searches. last i checked, special characters like hyphens also get stripped.

cheers
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[jshanab]

Switch to a free database that is better with large datasets (postgres?)
Throw hardware at it? Maybe the community will pitch in.

I was searching for "installing debian package" and it was reduced to debian which gave a ridiculus, useless result. leaving me to go thru things one at a time.
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ghidra: 2.6.18-gentoo-r3 x86_64 AMD64 with xfce4 across 2 monitors; reiserfs on LVM2
hamal: Gentoo 2.6.16-gentoo-r4, athlonxp 1600 with gnome,reiserfs, LVM2.
jeffnote Gentoo 2.6.20-suspend2-r?, IBM T22
HTC_apache: Next convert, my ppc6700 phone

[desultory]

[dilbot]

I've been noticing that the Gentoo search and Previous Posts functions don't pick up on a lot of the entries. When I go to search for some topic I remember, the search doesn't pick it up. Also, a lot of my Previous Posts don't appear. It's not a big deal,
but maybe something to look at ...