I apologize ahead of time; I’m sure this has been discussed to death already, but I’m wondering if there are any plans to reduce the delay time between searches.
I just did a search, but had a typo in my search parameters. Now I’m waiting five minutes to try again.
It just seems like an incredibly long time to make someone wait. What was going to be a quick check on something is now a much longer and more inconvenient process for me.
Is the 300s search delay a likely permanent ‘feature’ of the boards, or is it a stop-gap for something else that might be changed in the future?
I know that other vBulletin boards I visit either have NO delay between searches, or it’s very brief, like 10 seconds, 30 seconds, etc.
I also see no practical reason for a 5-min delay – it also stymied a search I tried to do the other day, where I needed to try different criteria to hit what I was looking for.
Use google advanced search and you will have no delays. And their search algorithm will surely beat anything Vbulletin can come up with by way of quality.
It’s not actually true. Perhaps google hasn’t indexed the whole site, yet, but for example I recently was searching for a particular thread I posted in where I was certain to have used the word “javascript” (it was this one), and a SDMB search for posts with “javascript” in the keywords field and “ntucker” in the author field returns 9 results. Google for “site:boards.straightdope.com javascript ntucker” returns 5 results and none of them is that post.
So google isn’t as good yet. Also note that google knows nothing about the individual posts in a thread, so it’s unable to limit results to posts where a particular user said something. If the two search terms show up on a single page, that’s a match.
I note that we just passed the 11 million post mark yesterday. Even the most determined little spider is going to take some time getting to everything, that’s a whole lot of posting to go through.
But you can search over and over again on Google – a lot – waiting for the SDMB search engine to come back to you.
Not to step on the administration’s toes, I think you’re doing a great job, but you may want to consider a shared search page with Google if you haven’t already.
I think they will let you add a search box that is domain-specific to the site, then let you take a cut from your own Adsense on the results page.
Frankly I am a bit torn about not being able to see Adsense on the threads page, on the more obscure subjects some very, er, interesting advertisements came up that, ah, piqued my interest