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johnm214

Registered: 05/31/07
Posts: 17,582
Loc: Americas

Search function feedback

#8021993 - 02/14/08 11:20 AM (18 years, 7 months ago)

This site has probably the best search function out of any I've been on.

Allows multiple options, actually works, et cet...

:thumbup:

Did this thing just come out of the box w/ the forum software or did you have to tinker with it?

I don't know why this seems to be such a hard concept, but other sites can't figure it out.

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Ythan
ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ

Registered: 08/08/97
Posts: 19,241
Loc: NY/MA/VT Borderlands

Last seen: 1 hour, 7 minutes

Re: Search function feedback

[Re: johnm214]
#8022126 - 02/14/08 12:00 PM (18 years, 7 months ago)

Thanks for the kind words. :smile:

Most sites use MySQL's built-in fulltext search capability because it's easy to set up and doesn't require any additional software. However, that's about all it has going for it. Performance is extremely poor on large datasets, and relevance ranking is very basic. A while ago we transitioned to Sphinx for the site and forum search, and that's responsible for the high quality of search results. It also allowed us to achieve page generation times averaging under 100 milliseconds, even while eliminating post expiration from OTD and seeing our post count grow from 3.5 million to 5 million+. Besides the fact that it's super-fast, Sphinx also supports proximity, phrase & statistical ranking with field weighting, porter-stemming, and soundex morphology; we take advantage of all these features to improve search relevance (except for soundex - we use aspell to correct typos and misspellings instead). All the credit belongs to Andrew Aksyonoff, who wrote the software and released it under the GPL. If you can't tell, I'm thrilled with Sphinx and I give it my highest recommendation. Thanks for giving me an opportunity to fawn over it a little. :wink: