Faster search!

No more having to pop to the loo/make a cup of tea/go to sleep while waiting for the search feature, hopefully.

Try it out, see what you think.

Yep, that's faster. It does have issues, though.

I'm using Firefox, granite forum theme. The search results are about 2x wider than the screen on my 1024x768 display.

[edit]

Tried a couple of other themes at random (OldLady and Minimalist), also tried using IE6 - get the same problem in all cases.

Hmm, can't recreate that one. Anyone else getting that?

Nope. FireFox 1.5 here.

Try searching for 'type'.

I've tried searching for a couple of terms - 'blitz' (returns a lot of results), and 'banana' (returns only a few results). Both of these don't reproduce the problem.

Got me stumped, this one... can't see the connection.

[edit]
Aha.... http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=57988#647416

That's the thread that's causing the problem when you search for 'type' as there's a long line of #############'s in the code box which is making the results page/column very wide.

I'm sure this issue is going to crop up with other search strings too... guess I just got (un)lucky.

It's foppy's post, it's full of ##### which expands the window somewhat.

Um, yea. I was just editing to say that!

Ah, much better, only thing I could say is that I'm more accustomed in other fourms to clicking on the "Post" column of the search rather then the "Thread #####" column.


Think you can set it up to not include results from forums/threads your account cannot get access too?
(annoying to click a search-result link then get the Internal Error msg)

And possibly a "No results Found" message rather then a blank table for those obscure search terms. =\

Much faster; fantastic!

Obviously still needs some fine tuning... I like the topic column being there in per post view, but perhaps they should be actual topic titles...

I think it would improve things to have a "search posts" and "search topics" button, (or something similar) which tells whether to display outcome by topics or by posts.

Well the main reason it's faster is that it's not having to reference the topics table at all. I'll keep having a fiddle though.

this sounds great, I'll try it out soon instead of asking dumb questions in the BMax thread.

Wait a minute - forget faster. This thing is just better at searching - ie it goes back further.

Right, time to search for that sock that I left in a thread a few months back.

Excellent. It's actually usable in IE7 now.

THANK GOD!


Wow, I thought it was just me that had slow searches (to much to querry) ;-)

Yeah that. And the fact you can search all the forums at once now.

Top. Stuff. Thankyou very much.

Nice, now what about them thar RSS feeds, mhmm? (taters..)

Well done, really fast now.

@simonh : Ups: you need to escape hyphens ( ' ) or:

faster!! thank you

The speed is great but is offset against not being able to target specific forums. Wading through irrelevant hits means it takes me about the same time to find what I want.

That's an apostrophe. A hyphen is ( - )

You can search through whatever forums you want, just like always. You don't have to search "all". The only difference is its way faster now!

Very Good Job, Si! You da man!

good job Si... thx... it's a lot better...

--Mike

It's a fantastic speed increase but there's a bit of an issue where it doesn't match whole words, just a sequence of characters. For example, try searching for my name and it will return all the posts where the sequence rik appears, even if it is in the worke 'strike' for example.

Similarly, try searching for 'eat' and it would find it in all sorts of words, like great, create, heat, teather, weather etc. which makes the results rather irrelevant.

Really? On my system you can search a forum section (e.g BlitzMax) but trying to search an individual forum (e.g. Bug Reports) returns hits in all BlitzMax forums.

Oh, so you are saying my post is full of #^%$^%$ !!!

;)

I have removed the #### :)

Hey, much better :)

Now if you could also add search to the "Special Forums"
and "code archives" in particular I'd give you a hug !

NOTHING has changed but the speed. Why do we always have jerks who have to complain.

Gee Si, the job you did fixing the search feature really sucks. I mean come on Si, you really screwed it up, it works just like it did before and lets us search in the same way it did before (all or individual forum categories), but it really sucks. Come on Si, you shouldn't have done this, I want it back like it was before, nice and slow! *tears* I am shivering under my bed in fear wetting my pants because the forum search is too fast, change it back to being slow, I just can't cope.

This is what you are saying TonyG?

Define irony.

That's not how I read it.

Well done. Works better now, so much faster.

Yeah, TonyG is right to be fair - you can't search individual forums now. This was a trade-off to make it faster.

I'll keep playing with though. It's possible the option to search individual forums can be made available again, it will just be slower than the normal search.

Nope.



That's what I'm saying.



but I'm prepared to act like a man and not be immature.
So... NA-NA-NA NA NA-NA.

Ok I'll try again:

There is an error in the parsing of the search text. If you enter ' as part of the search string, you will get the error:

its about time :]
- heh, cheers! ;) :p

I like it :0)

Actually a lot more than the speed has changed. The previous search gave the results by topic, which I found much easier to find what I was looking for. (Topics are usually short and to the point.)

The new method displays an entire line of info that happens to have the word you are searching for. Often these lines make no sense, since they are taken out of context. The topic is simply displayed as the topic number.

Personally, I liked the old version much better, even though I had to wait a bit for the results. I'm not going to try to say what's better for everyone, just stating my opinion. These forums and all the code archives are a tremendous resource, and there is a lot of info here to search.

OK, I've been working on it again and this time I bring you...super search!

You now have a number of options to choose from when searching, which hopefully covers most of the things mentioned above.

Let me know if you find any quirks. Hopefully I'm finished with the forum search for a while - onto the code archives search next...

Looks great,... doesn't work though. (Tried Firefox and IE)

I get this:
<removed>

I like the idea though,... should keep everyone happy.

Yeah, it stopped working for a few minutes while I changed something. Working again now.

Yep, looks good and seems to work for the few searches I tried.

Yep. I'm happy I can come out from under the bed and use the slow/steady search function to save on pant-washing... phew!

Coolness and awesome all at the same time!

Aw, I'm going to miss the regular threads bitching about how bad the search function is. :P

Hold on, I spoke too soon. :P

Now, when I click on a link in the list of matching items, and then press the 'back' button, I get 'page has expired', so I have to do the search all over again. :/

Yeah, I'm not sure how to solve that at the moment. It used to happen before as well.

To get around it for now, open links in new windows/tabs from the search results page.

I get page expired too. Happens a lot on php pages for me, I hate it...

Did it? I was pretty sure it used to work ok - maybe my memory's going. :)

Also, would it not be fairly simple to get clicked links to automatically open in a new window (instead of holding down SHIFT, or whatever the key is)?

i got that also with the old. I think you can just click refresh, at least in IE

But then people don't have the option of not opening a new window.

Not the request for searching the code archives...

Yes, I noticed that list of options.
Thanks :)


Still need that code archives search :P

Code archives search is next on my todo list.

Heh, nice, was expecting the "Advance" search to just be the old search setup, but apparently it isn't, and it's still miles faster then the old search engine, nice job.

Cool, thx :)

wow, fantastic! thanx very much for fixing search on this site!!!!

me thinks someone has discovered MySQL's full-text index capabilities. :)

I fiddled around with that at my last job.

Powerful stuff that also lets you easily implement the "did you really mean to search this?" and "related topic" type scenarios.