Date: Sat, 8 Aug 1998 22:26:02 +0200 From: Wolfram Schneider <wosch@FreeBSD.ORG> To: Jason Evans <jasone@canonware.com>, freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Search engine on web site flakey. Message-ID: <19980808222602.A6235@panke.de> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.96.980807153346.2126D-100000@orkan.canonware.com>; from Jason Evans on Fri, Aug 07, 1998 at 03:51:06PM -0700 References: <Pine.BSF.3.96.980807153346.2126D-100000@orkan.canonware.com>
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On 1998-08-07 15:51:06 -0700, Jason Evans wrote: > I have experienced poor results with the > http://www.freebsd.org/search.html search engine. In particular, I have > used it many times over the past couple of years to look for information > in the mail archives. For the last 9 months I have been subscribed to > many of the lists, and I specifically remember email messages that I can > not get the search engine to find. Here are the problems I think I'm > seeing: > > 1) Threads seem to be disjoint. If i find a message from a thread, I > can't find all of the messages that originally belonged to the thread. Not all E-Mail clients support threads. Without the mail header field References or In-Reply-to it is hard to create threads. > 2) Searches apparently don't include the mail headers in the search. This > makes a whole slew of searches impractical. I doubt. > 4) Limiting the number of results apparently causes the search engine to > stop as soon as it finds N results, then sort them. Correct. You are always searching by 'score' and the cgi script re-sort the N results by score, date, subject or author. 'sort by' changes the presentation of the results, not the search engine. > Instead, all matches > should be found, sorted, then the first N displayed. We don't have the resources for a better search engine. > I'm guessing that 4) is the root of most of the evil I'm experiencing. Well, you can set the number of results N to a high value (100 or 500). Wolfram To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-doc" in the body of the message
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