Is the search function ever going to be half as good as it was formerly?

No, it is now as good as it is going to get.

This is baffling to me. Search is faster now and I haven't had any trouble finding what I was looking for.

I certainly find it odd too. I have never had any trouble finding what I need. Forgive me for the earlier bluntness, but questions around the search I find sit somewhere between frustrating and just comical. The question is always put the same way, Roughly, "I searched for something and it didn't find it, therefore the search must be shit". There's another possibility (never explored): the person using the search's brain is shit.

Nine times out of ten when I have asked someone to then post whatever they're looking for, I can find it in seconds, by just using the search. It really does seem that almost all the of the time, what people are having trouble with is thinking of the right thing to search for, not the actual search itself having problems.

If you search for threads about the search, you'll find loads of threads talking about how the old search was shit. It now seems, through the rose-tinted spectacles, to have become this amazing thing that always found what people were looking for, even although it searches in the same way as the current one does. It was, however, so inefficient that it had to just be turned off for the last six months of old ILX's life, to prevent it just bringing the rest of ILX down.

There are documented downsides of the current search, but they really don't apply very often, and I have volunteered before to help people find what they need, should it fall into this 0.1% category.

I certainly find it odd too. I have never had any trouble finding what I need. Forgive me for the earlier bluntness, but questions around the search I find sit somewhere between frustrating and just comical. The question is always put the same way, Roughly, "I searched for something and it didn't find it, therefore the search must be shit". There's another possibility (never explored): the person using the search's brain is shit.

Sorry for the bluntness but: fuck you. I don't think what you're suggesting applies in this case. I have a lot of experience with online searching. It's part of what I do professionally, and has been an even bigger part in the past.

The new internal (non-Google) search only cover titles, right, or am I missing something? That's a pretty significant change. Google is not sufficiently picking up the slack for keyword searching. One reason I know this is because I have a pretty good memory and am remembering that specific names have come up on ILM in the past but are not turning up in a Google search. I think part of this is that I've been posting for so long and I am able to remember things posts that are just no longer findable.

Nine times out of ten when I have asked someone to then post whatever they're looking for, I can find it in seconds, by just using the search.

Same here.

If you search for threads about the search, you'll find loads of threads talking about how the old search was shit. It now seems, through the rose-tinted spectacles, to have become this amazing thing that always found what people were looking for, even although it searches in the same way as the current one does.

I never had much trouble with it. We had our own keyword search (for the text of messages) before and we don't now. Are you seriously saying that's not a big difference?

For example:

Try finding more than one mention of "Yomo Toro" (whose name come up recently) using the Google search.

But I happen to remember having mentioned him in the context of John Fahey:

I wonder if he listened to Yomo Toro at all.

Search and Destroy: John Fahey

I'm pretty sure there are other times when I've had something (maybe something more) to say about him.

I'm just providing this as an example, not claiming that the loss of this particular mention is a tragedy.

Or again:

Jury is still out on the Yomo Toro CD, which I like more, although it's awfully European-sounding and romantic in a classical music sort of way, at times anyway. Sometimes it sounds like Italian restaurant music to me. When I hear him on salsa CDs, his playing is usually earthier sounding. But there are a lot of terrific melodies (all by the same composer) on this CD.

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.ilxor.com+";yomo%20toro"&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

If I, or someone else, had actually said something interesting about Yomo Toro, someone searching under his name probably wouldn't find it.

http://www.brooklynvegan.com/img/music/tompkinsbandshell.jpg

http://gopkorea.blogs.com/flyingyangban/prefightpeprally.jpg

http://www.uwrf.edu/library/arc/features/protest1972.jpg

I kind of agree with you, LaRue, but it doesn't look like Keith is going to budge, so in the meantime I created this thread
Who Will Be Playing Yomo Toro In The Soon-To-Be-Released Hector Lavoe Biopic El Cantante?
for future use.

I swear we've had an WKRP thread before, but darned if I could find it.

i can't find the the thread i started about members of the house. i ended up just putting "members" into the search and clicked through all the pages, shit never showed up.

Yeah, I totally agree that search is definitely not as good as it used to be.

Hm, I just learned something. You need to include an apostrophe s if it is there. So "Markson" matches nothing but "Markson's" gives two threads.

James,

The problem with a message search is that it is just too heavyweight for the small machine that ILX runs on to cope with. ILX has now around 5.4 million messages on it (by way of contrast, it had under 5 million on it in February). Old ILX's message search (and indeed all of the search) was turned off long before the site finally died. There are other ways for this to work, and I did develop them initially, but despite being faster, they still proved too costly to run, and hence too likely to impact people just using ILX in general; as was another search I implemented that allowed you to look for your own messages in a given month; it was simply too heavyweight and locked the messages table for far too long for it not to impact the smooth running of ILX.

Message searching worked for a while on old ILX simply because the database was a lot smaller than it is now. Once the search starts to take too long, it holds locks that prevent certain aspects of the rest of ILX working (adding a message, for example - you will recall sometimes waiting for about a minute after adding a message). Old ILX mitigated this by carrying out the searching on a replicated copy of the database; however, this adds additional load on to the whole system (as well as increasing the frequency of the database corruptions it suffered) and ultimately, as was the case, it couldn't cope and ILX simply didn't run at all.

So the idea was to implement a thread search (which is far less of a problem, since there are only 140,000 threads), and to let Google take care of the message searching; after all, they have tens of thousands of computers. However, Google has taken a surprising amount of time to find ILX, after it moved from the old site. It only found the "View threads in month" page a few weeks ago, and started reindexing. It does appear to have made good progress now, and if you search for "Yomo Toro" now you'll see it comes back with a whole bunch of results. I've no idea if it's all of them, but it will get there.

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.ilxor.com+%22Yomo%20Toro%22&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

Oh and incidentally you are right about the "Markson's" thing... This is how it's supposed to operate, as you likely wouldn't want "Markson" in the results, if you were just searching for "Mark"; if you do want this, then you can search for "Mark*"

OK thanks, Keith. I just noticed one more thing: the Google search seems to have some case sensitivity, because "Yomo Toro" gives one more result than "yomo toro."

let Google take care of the message searching; after all, they have tens of thousands of computers. However, Google has taken a surprising amount of time to find ILX, after it moved from the old site

Keith, you need to pare everything down to one URL. With the three extant URLs Google is flagging everything as duplicate content (a hallmark of spammers). Unless I'm mistaken and the other two URLs are now redirecting to ilxor now.

Yeah you're right. I'll give Stet a shout about that. Cheers.