A problem with searching

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1

There appears to be a bug in the search engine. I’ve been trying for the better part of the day to find an old thread, but no go. The first time, I set my search to “A year ago or older”, since I thought that the thread was more than a year ago. After the expected long wait, I got to a screen that told me that sorry, nothing was found to match my search terms. So I go back to the search input page, and change my search to “A year ago or newer”. Eventually, I get a blank page. I try “any date”, and get the same blank page. I wait several hours and try again… The same. And by “blank page”, I mean exactly that: When I view source, the entire page consists of <html><body></body></html> . What’s happening to the search engine, and how can we get around it?

For what it’s worth, btw, the thread I was trying to find was a Cafe Society thread about the movie The Time Machine, in which I posted some calculations concerning the Moon.

2

There was talk today of rebuilding the search index. Perhaps that is still happening.

3

I get the same thing on all searches.

4

The database was, again, corrupted and had to be rebuilt.

Hopefully things are better now . . . however, if it’s still not working as you would like, I have no clue as to how to fix it and I apologize.

your humble TubaDiva
Administrator

5

OK, I’m getting non-blank pages now. It’s still telling me no matches, but at least we’re on speaking terms again.

6

Maybe “time” is one of those words that the search engine doesn’t index, due to its popularity as a word on the boards? I know there was a thread about this some time ago, and Una Persson posted a link to the “bad words” you mustn’t search for.

F_X

7

This might be it, only there are no calculations in the post. It’s about the movie The Time Machine, and that’s the only one I could find in the search.

Hope that helps…

F_X

8

The calculations are on the second page. Dunno whether it was a prohibited word or what, but user=Chronos, forum=Cafe Society and keyword=moon brought it right up. Apparently so did keyword=machine.

9

It’s not a matter of you musn’t search for them, they just are common words that aren’t in the Index. So searching on them doesn’t do any good.

10

That is indeed the thread, which makes me wonder why I didn’t find it. I used keywords “time machine” (without quotes, of course), search titles only, forum Cafe Society, username Chronos, a year ago or older. Even if “time” is a badword, the search engine should still have processed the search on “machine”, right? Is the search engine perhaps case-specific? I don’t think I capitalized “time machine” in my search.

11

OK, Chronos. I can’t test here since the Search is so slow, and I can’t view the source code from where I am, but I did some testing on my Board to confirm.

It seems, from testing searching for a thread titled “Snopes Siting”, that the terms in the field are AND delimited by default. That is, I did a “Search on titles” for

Snopes

and it worked. I did a search for

Snopes Siting

and it worked. Then I did a search on

Snopes Siting Wolverine

and it failed. Thus, it looks like it’s doing an AND. And if one of the words you are searching for is a “badword”, then perhaps it returns a “fail”, and the AND fails. Does that make sense?

You can also use “OR”. This search in my test:

Snopes Siting OR Wolverine

did work, for example.