Ed, how long until you will advise how long it will be until the search works?

[elmwood]

I get database errors on searching, and it resets to 300 seconds.

@Straight Dope Message Board

Database Error Database error
The Straight Dope Message Board database has encountered a problem.
Please try the following:

* Load the page again by clicking the Refresh button in your web browser.
* Open the boards.straightdope.com home page, then try to open another page.
* Click the Back button to try another link.

The boards.straightdope.com forum technical staff have been notified of the error, though you may contact them if the problem persists.

We apologise for any inconvenience.

I’ll ask what others have. Search works on other vBulletin-based boards that have similar activity as the SDMB. Why not here? What’s so different about the SDMB?

[tomndebb]

@elmwood

What’s so different about the SDMB?

Age?

Are the boards with similar activity as old as the SDMB with as many archived posts of interminable length?
(A question; not a response.)

[Crazyhorse]

It might not be en elegant long term solution, but if you want to do a complex search of the SDMB right now just use Google advanced search and limit the search results to the domain: boards.straightdope.com

On the google page click ‘advanced’, enter whatever you want to search for, e.g. “World Health Organization” and in a small box at the bottom of that screen there is an option to “Search within a site or domain”. In that box enter boards.straightdope.com and you now have your own powerful search engine of all indexed SDMB pages. You can perform all manner of complex searches that way, including quoted searches, 3 letter searches, AND, OR, and NOT searches, etc. and it is very fast and puts zero strain on this board. Not quite as nice as having it built-in but it really gets the job done.

[NineToTheSky]

@Crazyhorse

It might not be en elegant long term solution, but if you want to do a complex search of the SDMB right now just use Google advanced search and limit the search results to the domain: boards.straightdope.com

On the google page click ‘advanced’, enter whatever you want to search for, e.g. “World Health Organization” and in a small box at the bottom of that screen there is an option to “Search within a site or domain”. In that box enter boards.straightdope.com and you now have your own powerful search engine of all indexed SDMB pages. You can perform all manner of complex searches that way, including quoted searches, 3 letter searches, AND, OR, and NOT searches, etc. and it is very fast and puts zero strain on this board. Not quite as nice as having it built-in but it really gets the job done.

I’ve tried this, and its ability to get results seems to be severely limited. Just as one example: I did a vanity search, and Google came up with eighteen results. My post count is getting on for 1000, and that doesn’t include people who have quoted me.

According to Jerry here,

<snip>The message board has been opened up to the Google search index spider. This has been ongoing since Friday. I’m not sure if Google will ever be able to completely index the message board and it will probably be months before it’s even mostly indexed but the process has started. As time goes on I’ll start letting other search engine spiders in as well but right now I’m focusing just on Google.

it may get better.

[Crazyhorse]

@NineToTheSky

I’ve tried this, and its ability to get results seems to be severely limited. Just as one example: I did a vanity search, and Google came up with eighteen results. My post count is getting on for 1000, and that doesn’t include people who have quoted me.

According to Jerry here, it may get better.

Ah, I see what you mean. I searched for the example “World Health Organization” and also did a similar search of my username before posting, with pretty good results. But I have few posts and the percentage found was much higher than when searching for yours.

Yes this should improve in a short time if they only recently allowed access to the google snooper, er crawler.