Search Feature

Has the search be disable or is there "user error" on my part? I havent been able to search in about a month. My CBuzz club login has remained so I'm not sure it can be a cookie problem, but hey, I'm generally clueless.
T.I.A. jeremy

I got it to. I sent Jeff a PM

Yes, the search has been down for some time.

An alternative approach is to use google and enter:

site:www.coasterbuzz.com "search term here"

That will generally bring good results - at least similar to the on-site search.

Yeah, the search is "broken" (or more specifically, the index is turned off) because it just didn't scale well and it was bogging down the server. It's an embarrassing state to leave it in, I admit, but it's just not something I can easily fix until the replacement site is built.

Jeff, I know I've asked this before, but when you rebuild the search feature, can you include an ability to do "fuzzy" searches? I'd certainly find it a significant improvement, if it's possible.

Depends... how do you define "fuzzy?"

If I type in a specific thing (which I guess isn't really fuzzy), I would get that actual thing in the search return.

I.E. - I type in Volcano Blast coaster in, and have it search by title, the words Volcano Blast coaster are actually in the title. That isn't how it works right now.

I don't even know what the hell RANK means anyway...

All I know is, whenever I've used the search in the past, it doesn't exactly return things like a more traditional search engine does. I don't know if that helps, but my point is I want to type something in, and that EXACT thing is either in the title, or in the text of the message.

As for fuzzy, I guess I'm referring to an approximate spelling, as it were. Say I type in Voyage, the search engine would come back with anything in it that was close... i.e. voyaga, voyager, etc. Something that would account for obvious misspellings.

Whatcha (;)) think?

That last part is a lot harder to do. Not impossible, certainly, but with a lack of academic background, I'm not even sure where I'd start.

Searching for junk in the databases will be way cool in the next version.

Searching in the forum will be made better with my own search engine. I've prototyped it, and it works reasonably well. Basically it indexes all of the non-junk words and scores them based on frequency, and whether or not they appear in the title. About a year ago I ran the prototype against a copy of the CoasterBuzz forum and it worked surprisingly well, and surprisingly fast.

As soon as the new forum app has at least basic functionality, I'm going to post it on its own site and let people mess with it, regardless of what features have been implemented. From that point, I won't necessarily respond to every feature request, but at least I'll have a better idea of what is important to the group of people I consider some of the most practical forum participants.

Very cool! Thanks for the heads up, and info.

Have fun on the engine build. ;)

Would even just using the SQL query "LIKE" be fuzzy enough for Rob?

If it works. :)

LIKE only works for partial matches, and you need to be smart enough to know what the root of a word is. LIKE '%match%' will hit match, matches, matched, bigmatch, etc., but if you enter "matching," I don't know that the root word is "match."

Were you still taking the approach of indexing every not-so-common word that you mentioned some time ago?

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Searching in the forum will be made better with my own search engine. I've prototyped it, and it works reasonably well. Basically it indexes all of the non-junk words and scores them based on frequency, and whether or not they appear in the title. About a year ago I ran the prototype against a copy of the CoasterBuzz forum and it worked surprisingly well, and surprisingly fast.

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And, you know, I even read that the other day.

Man, I'm getting old.

;)