What's the problem with PH search?

[sparkythecat]

On the infrequent occasions that I try and use the PH search facility, I invariably get the message

"The PH search facility is currently under maintenance. Please use the Google search below until it's back."

Is it permanently broken, or what exactly is the problem ?

Google search is pants.

[TheHeretic]

Always has been... Use this.

Bookmark it, and use that link, instead of PH search, and life will improve slightly. Just put your search terms after a space.

[MattDell]

It's down semi-permanently. It might come back in its current form, but it also might not.

[jamieboy]

Shame. On the face of it, running a simple text search against a stale, static copy of yesterday's data doesn't seem like an insurmountable technical challenge.

[miniman]

jamieboy said:

Shame. On the face of it, running a simple text search against a stale, static copy of yesterday's data doesn't seem like an insurmountable technical challenge.

But with the frequency Google spiders PH, yesterday's data looks rather sad.

There is a really simple thing that PH could do. Remove the custom Google search box and replace it with one that simply passes the search query to Google with the site:www.pistonheads.com preface. That gives better results than the current Google option.

[jamieboy]

miniman said:

But with the frequency Google spiders PH, yesterday's data looks rather sad.

There is a really simple thing that PH could do. Remove the custom Google search box and replace it with one that simply passes the search query to Google with the site:www.pistonheads.com preface. That gives better results than the current Google option.

Agreed, in this day and age only being able to search yesterday's data is a bit poor. Equally, the google search isn't really much use if you want to find all the threads posted yesterday that have a specific word in them.

[miniman]

jamieboy said:

miniman said:

But with the frequency Google spiders PH, yesterday's data looks rather sad.

There is a really simple thing that PH could do. Remove the custom Google search box and replace it with one that simply passes the search query to Google with the site:www.pistonheads.com preface. That gives better results than the current Google option.

Agreed, in this day and age only being able to search yesterday's data is a bit poor. Equally, the google search isn't really much use if you want to find all the threads posted yesterday that have a specific word in them.

The one on the PH search page isn't. The other one isn't terrible.

[jamieboy]

miniman said:

The one on the PH search page isn't. The other one isn't terrible.

OK, happy to be persuaded.

I want to do a search for "Alfa", I want to search across all the various sub-forums, I want to get a single result for each thread where it is found, and I want to sort the results in descending chronological order so I see the most recent posts first.

If there's a google search syntax for that, then I'm probably not the only person who'd like to know what it is.

[RichB]

Clearly Haymarket do not want to fix Pistionheads search facility so we are stuck with the Google one. You will get the "techies" saying use Google and double back-slash this and semi-colon that and it works fine as long as you remember to use the space and put your search phrase in quotes but ho hum, each to their own.

Personally I think it's totally inadequate compared to the advanced search capabilities that the old Pistonheads search offered but that's progress for you... Or cost saving?

[miniman]

jamieboy said:

OK, happy to be persuaded.

I want to do a search for "Alfa", I want to search across all the various sub-forums, I want to get a single result for each thread where it is found, and I want to sort the results in descending chronological order so I see the most recent posts first.

If there's a google search syntax for that, then I'm probably not the only person who'd like to know what it is.

try this google search

just trimming down this URL so the whole page doesn't expand -Matt

Edited by MattDell on Wednesday 11th July 21:52

[paulrussell]

RichB said:

Clearly Haymarket do not want to fix Pistionheads search facility so we are stuck with the Google one. You will get the "techies" saying use Google and double back-slash this and semi-colon that and it works fine as long as you remember to use the space and put your search phrase in quotes but ho hum, each to their own.

Personally I think it's totally inadequate compared to the advanced search capabilities that the old Pistonheads search offered but that's progress for you... Or cost saving?

Since the techies are busy with the beta classifieds, you can't them to fix the search facility can you?

[jamieboy]

miniman said:

https://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&as_q=alf...

Excellent! Multiple results for each thread, but otherwise it's practically usable. Thanks!

[miniman]

jamieboy said:

Excellent! Multiple results for each thread, but otherwise it's practically usable. Thanks!

I'll admit though, it's a bi of a faff.

[RichB]

paulrussell said:

RichB said:

Clearly Haymarket do not want to fix Pistionheads search facility so we are stuck with the Google one. You will get the "techies" saying use Google and double back-slash this and semi-colon that and it works fine as long as you remember to use the space and put your search phrase in quotes but ho hum, each to their own.

Personally I think it's totally inadequate compared to the advanced search capabilities that the old Pistonheads search offered but that's progress for you... Or cost saving?

Since the techies are busy with the beta classifieds, you can't them to fix the search facility can you?

One the basis that the classifieds make money and the forum doesn't eh?

[paulrussell]

RichB said:

paulrussell said:

RichB said:

Clearly Haymarket do not want to fix Pistionheads search facility so we are stuck with the Google one. You will get the "techies" saying use Google and double back-slash this and semi-colon that and it works fine as long as you remember to use the space and put your search phrase in quotes but ho hum, each to their own.

Personally I think it's totally inadequate compared to the advanced search capabilities that the old Pistonheads search offered but that's progress for you... Or cost saving?

Since the techies are busy with the beta classifieds, you can't them to fix the search facility can you?

One the basis that the classifieds make money and the forum doesn't eh?

I'll let someone from PH towers awnser that, as I don't know the awnser.

[RichB]

Only joshing but it's a fair guess

[MattDell]

RichB said:

paulrussell said:

RichB said:

Clearly Haymarket do not want to fix Pistionheads search facility so we are stuck with the Google one. You will get the "techies" saying use Google and double back-slash this and semi-colon that and it works fine as long as you remember to use the space and put your search phrase in quotes but ho hum, each to their own.

Personally I think it's totally inadequate compared to the advanced search capabilities that the old Pistonheads search offered but that's progress for you... Or cost saving?

Since the techies are busy with the beta classifieds, you can't them to fix the search facility can you?

One the basis that the classifieds make money and the forum doesn't eh?

On the basis that we have over ten million posts on the forum and running a text-based SQL "like" query takes too long to complete when we have that many posts to sift through, especially when we release it to you lot and you all start searching at the same time.

Like we've said before, this is a huge forum running on extremely old software and that makes it difficult to scale up to the amount of traffic we have these days. We're never going to have a reliable search with this architecture, but the sooner we get the new classifieds site out and running smoothly then the sooner we can focus our attention on the forum. Hurrah!

-Matt

[miniman]

http://lucene.apache.org/solr/

[MattDell]

Yes, we're well aware of Solr and it's used quite heavily in the beta classifieds.

The problem is it doesn't plug in very well with Classic ASP.

[miniman]

I heard somewhere else on here that moving over to vBulletin will solve all these problems.