Is the search function actually going to work in 2013?

[jock mcsporran]

Happy new year, etc, but as per the title. Is the search function scheduled to work for more than a couple of days this year? It's a right pain in the bks using the Google search to find something in a specific forum.

[havoc]

Agreed. Google search on PH is about as much use as a chocolate teapot, quite frankly.

[Seti]

The magic eight ball says: no fking chance.

[soad]

Seti said:

The magic eight ball says: no fking chance.

[jock mcsporran]

I guess not since I can't remember when it last worked or since nobody can be arsed to give an answer whenever this question comes up.

I don't remember these issues before Haymarket bought PH. It seemed to work fine prior to that.

[MattDell]

The reason is simple, there's too many posts to search through these days. At my last count, many months ago, there were over 10 billion posts in the forum.

The forum infrastructure is built on Classic ASP and MySQL and a search is literally a MySQL "like" query. The non-technical explanation of that is we use extremely old technology to do the search and since the site has grown so much in the past few years it takes too long to look through all the posts and come back with a result.

So in 2013, we plan on updating the forum search to use the same technology as the (very speedy) classifieds search.

-Matt

[soad]

Thanks for the update.

Onwards and upwards then.

[Djdan]

MattDell said:

The reason is simple, there's too many posts to search through these days. At my last count, many months ago, there were over 10 billion posts in the forum.

The forum infrastructure is built on Classic ASP and MySQL and a search is literally a MySQL "like" query. The non-technical explanation of that is we use extremely old technology to do the search and since the site has grown so much in the past few years it takes too long to look through all the posts and come back with a result.

So in 2013, we plan on updating the forum search to use the same technology as the (very speedy) classifieds search.

-Matt

Can you then not archive all the old posts and start afresh?

[CAPP0]

Djdan said:

Can you then not archive all the old posts and start afresh?

PH Search said:

Your search returned no results

[Djdan]

No change to Normal! Surely a standard google search would bring up the old stuff and a new database could be created from now

[jock mcsporran]

Djdan said:

No change to Normal! Surely a standard google search would bring up the old stuff and a new database could be created from now

The PH google search was the reason for asking what the delay is in getting things fixed. It's rubbish as a substitute for how the original search was. The google search seems to be limited to 12 characters (at least on Chrome). There used to be some sort of workaround but can't find the thread explaining it.

At least the techies have said it's being worked on but hopefully sooner rather than later.

[MattDell]

Djdan said:

No change to Normal! Surely a standard google search would bring up the old stuff and a new database could be created from now

The forum has its own dedicated database. The search function used to have its own dedicated database that was replicated off of the forum database to solely handle search requests; until we discovered it couldn't handle the search requests our users put through it. There isn't much "new databasing" that we can do. It requires new technology.

And don't call me Shirley.

[Vieste]

Yo Dawg.

[Supernova190188]

MattDell said:

The reason is simple, there's too many posts to search through these days. At my last count, many months ago, there were over 10 billion posts in the forum.

10 billion? You mean 10 million surely?

[MattDell]

Supernova190188 said:

MattDell said:

The reason is simple, there's too many posts to search through these days. At my last count, many months ago, there were over 10 billion posts in the forum.

10 billion? You mean 10 million surely?

Yep.

[Marf]

I find site:www.pistonheads.com [searchterm] works pretty well

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Awww.pisto...

[MonkeyBusiness]

Any updates to this?

The problem is getting worse as topics and threads are getting repeated?
A forum needs a search function.

When you say new technology what are we talking...hardware or software?

[Du1point8]

MattDell said:

Supernova190188 said:

MattDell said:

The reason is simple, there's too many posts to search through these days. At my last count, many months ago, there were over 10 billion posts in the forum.

10 billion? You mean 10 million surely?

Yep.

If that is the case I think someone needs to read up on binary tree indexing to speed up the search functionality so it can be done in milliseconds.

Indexing has been used in tables with 10s millions of rows and will come back with results quickly, so I dont see how PH can be designed in such a way that search cant be utilised due to its size.

[MattDell]

Indexing is fantastic if you're, say, expecting a result based on an index.

But in terms of searching this forum we're trying to match a partial string (your search) to a mysql text type (our 10 million replies) based on a MySQL LIKE query such as '%searchtexthere%', which wouldn't ever use an index even if there was one on the field we were searching because it has to search the entire field regardless.


Ideally we'd import all the replies into Solr, which is optimised to match partial text searches with stunning quickness.

[RobTVR.]

MattDell said:

Indexing is fantastic if you're, say, expecting a result based on an index.

But in terms of searching this forum we're trying to match a partial string (your search) to a mysql text type (our 10 million replies) based on a MySQL LIKE query such as '%searchtexthere%', which wouldn't ever use an index even if there was one on the field we were searching because it has to search the entire field regardless.


Ideally we'd import all the replies into Solr, which is optimised to match partial text searches with stunning quickness.

What on earth are you talking about.

When do you expect the search to be up and running again? To be honest i don't really see what the problem is, all other websites seem to manage having a simple search function so surely PH can have one? I'm sure there's a very good reason why anyway it's just that i'm too dumb to understand.