Why does SEARCH not work??

[bluemax]

It's been broken for MONTHS! It seems like no matter what you put into the search fields, you just don't get any results!

It's only good for searching by user... text within the documents (eg. search for "conroe") is near useless.

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Have you tried searching for threads previously on this subject

Anandtech Moderator

 

[Dualist]

I wouldn't hold my breath on getting the search feature improved, that appears to be on Anandtech's lowest priority list right now.

 

[bluemax]

I guess people don't use it anyway.

 

[KeithTalent]

Wow, I usually have no problems with the search but I just tried searching for something and it gave me a bunch of results from 2001 even though I had selected from last 90 days only

I used to think the search complainers where just a bunch of whiners, but now I see there is actually an issue.

 

[EagleKeeper]

Originally posted by: KeithTalent
Wow, I usually have no problems with the search but I just tried searching for something and it gave me a bunch of results from 2001 even though I had selected from last 90 days only

I used to think the search complainers where just a bunch of whiners, but now I see there is actually an issue.

There has always been issues - Everytime something is "fixed" more functionality breaks.

 

[Injury]

I don't know how the AT search works (or doesn't work, apparently) but I know some forums use sort of a "word bank" file combined with some other pre-defined words files to determine if a keyword is worth searching or not... as the word bank grows, the likelyhood that certain often used words will be considered generic increases too.

With a fast moving forum like AT, if this is what they use, then there is really no way to fix it other than to re-write the search function from the beginning... and having the forums manually search through a million or so posts would just put to great a strain on the server to make it possible.

The quick search works quite well, but only if people make useful thread titles with some keywords in them.

 

[Mark R]

The search works fine if you search in 'title or summary', but is completely non-functional in 'title or body' mode. At least part of the problem is that 'title or body' doesn't search the title or summary, but it also doesn't seem reliably to index the whole of the body either.

I'm pretty sure that the forums use Microsoft SQL server for the DB, and it's got some pretty damn good text searching capability. The problem is that it does need to be configured right, otherwise it doesn't always work.

I think I've worked out what the problem might be. The index for the body text hasn't been updated for several months (possibly over a year). So, posts newer than the index essentially don't appear in the search. That's why searching for Conroe only gives a thread where the word Conroe was mentioned a couple of years ago (I can't believe there was much talk of the Conroe CPUs back in 2004 and early 2005).

The thread titles and summaries are indexed seperately, so work fine.

Basically, it just needs someone to run an index update on the server, and ideally, switch on automatic updates - however, I'd imagine with a forum this busy and with such a large database, that this could be quite painful.

 

[chuckywang]

Yeah, it sucks when I can't find some thread that I actually have use for. It also sucks for stuff like PWNAGE of the year.

I think Search needs to be completely rewritten. Get rid of the legacy code, and just revamp it.

 

[Evadman]

Have you tried searching for threads previously on this subject
Anandtech Moderator

Yep. No matches found Seriously though, the only match when searching for "search" is for the "Split Programming off from Software forum" thread.