Are You Ever Going To Fix the Search Function?
Discussion
d 
IforB said:
It can't get any worse! Why not just disable the search section whilst you are "upgrading" it? It'd stop people like me wanting to drive down to PH towers and torching the place!
The Google option is always available, but we try to turn the search on as much as possible as there are certain things it can do better than the Google option.Galsia said:
Its not just me then. I've never seen a forum with a search function as broken this one. 90% of the time it is either down for maintenance or it just searches to infinity.
We are aware of the problems, we are just extremely short of development time with which to fix them. There are some search upgrades coming online shortly which should improve things, but I apologise that it has taken this long.
The search system for PistonHeads is very good when it works, but it hasn't been very good at being scalable for the content and size PistonHeads has now grown too.
This has meant the whole system is very unreliable as a search functionality and frankly it isn't good enough. The system needs work on improving it and this requires cost and time.
We have tried to tackle the problem by throwing more processing and computing resources at the box to speed things up, but with the data it is indexing it is still taking far too long. The truth is the underlying code and the way the system backs up needs tweaking to make it better, but we don't have the man power to do this at the moment.
We could implement a search box underneath (Google Search Appliance, Lucene/Solr etc) but this is a major project and one we are looking at for a different part of the site that the forums can piggy back on, but this is still up to 9 months away.
So the options available to us at the moment with the resource and money we have are:
a) Leave it as it is with the lottery style result of working or not
b) Turn it off so that we don't get constant feedback on it being broken and just use the Google approach
c) Rebuild the result set from Google into our own look and feel (this would have a commercial benefit with adSense and the like so can be self funding in the long run)
I am not a fan of removing functionality from a site, and the PH search is much better than the Google version for getting back accurate results, but if it is only working 25% of the time then really the only choice until we can rebuild it is to turn it off.
This has meant the whole system is very unreliable as a search functionality and frankly it isn't good enough. The system needs work on improving it and this requires cost and time.
We have tried to tackle the problem by throwing more processing and computing resources at the box to speed things up, but with the data it is indexing it is still taking far too long. The truth is the underlying code and the way the system backs up needs tweaking to make it better, but we don't have the man power to do this at the moment.
We could implement a search box underneath (Google Search Appliance, Lucene/Solr etc) but this is a major project and one we are looking at for a different part of the site that the forums can piggy back on, but this is still up to 9 months away.
So the options available to us at the moment with the resource and money we have are:
a) Leave it as it is with the lottery style result of working or not
b) Turn it off so that we don't get constant feedback on it being broken and just use the Google approach
c) Rebuild the result set from Google into our own look and feel (this would have a commercial benefit with adSense and the like so can be self funding in the long run)
I am not a fan of removing functionality from a site, and the PH search is much better than the Google version for getting back accurate results, but if it is only working 25% of the time then really the only choice until we can rebuild it is to turn it off.
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