I have Google toolbar which gives me an option to search only the current website - very useful in this case.
If you go to Google advanced search you have an option of typing in a site or domain to be searched within.
Ah thanks.
That may work, though you only really need the AND if there are many threads to choose from. You don’t need the Google toolbar - to make sure you only search the boards, make the search:
site:straightdope.com maastricht <thread subject>
As has already been referenced once in this thread,
here is everything you would want to know about how to search the Board using Google.
It’s quite extensive.
Entirely, but only as a last resort.
What is it about search that throws a goddamn database error EVERY TIME? This is not normal.
It’s because we’re searching way too often. The SDMB should implement a ten-minute waiting period between searches.
Is there any policy issue that would prevent having an on-site page with Google search?
A very good question. There’s clearly something wrong. It’s too bad nobody with the access has taken it upon himself to try and fix it. It’s “use the workaround” or “don’t search”.
The Google Search page is part of Google AdSense . . . which is turned off for members.
I am not sure I understood that answer. I meant a page with a simple search field that added all the appropriate strings automatically to whatever one typed on it. I might be wrong but it sounds like something easy to code for someone who knows what he is doing. Maybe Google even offers it as a premade template?
Can we please just get a comprehensive explanation WHY our search is so goddamn broken? And as an added bonus maybe why nothing is being done about it? I watched a really cool documentary 2 days, and I’ve been trying to search it ever since to no avail. I’ve probably tried 20 times. This is bullshit.
Listen, the problem is the database size. It’s too goddamned big. There are over 11 million posts in the database, which is probably well over 10 gigs in size by now (or perhaps 20 after considering the great number of impenetrable walls of text provided by eager windbags over the years) .
The problem is with MySQL and there is really nothing convenient that Ed or Jerry or anyone at the SDMB or Jelsoft can do about it. This happens to every large Vbulletin community and some have taken exotic steps to remedy the problem including the purchase of an expensive slave server and extensively hacking the board’s code or archiving 90% of their content and extensively hacking the board’s code
If the board mods can convince uncle cecil to convince jerry to submit a google sitemap containing all the board threads I will make the SDMB a fancy ajaxified search engine that contains all of the search tricks mentioned in my HOWTO in addition to other conveniences. Then, we can stop our perennial whining about the board search engine being broken since the google search will be far more awesome. As it stands I can’t be convinced to do that because google’s index of the sdmb is highly impoverished, containing only 10% of the content.
I just checked another board I frequent. Over 22 million posts. Flawless searching. And it is, and always has been, free to post.
I think your questions have been answered, beyond that I got nothin’.
You’re saying that search doesn’t work AT ALL here, because we have 11 million posts. I’m not buying it. It works fine on every other board I’ve ever visited, many of which have far more posts. If you could give examples of other popular and active messageboards with broken search engines, that might lend some support to your argument. I’ve never seen one.
And also, while I do appreciate your input, I don’t recall ever hearing your argument from an administrator here, so as far as I know for sure, what you’re saying has absolutely nothing to do with the actual problem. I’m not saying it doesn’t, either, but how can when know when the staff here refuses to communicate with us? TubaDiva is obviously aware of this thread, but so far she’s only half-answered half the questions in it, and we’ve heard nothing from any other admin or Ed or Jerry.
I think the problem is not just the volume of posts, which as you say happens in other boards that work fine. It is more that as it stands, the current implementation of this board is unstable. Not knowing jack of what I am talking about, I don’t know if the problem is a corrupt database, bad software combinations, insufficient hardware or what. In any case, the fact as demonstrated empirically, is that when you flip that switch, something horrible happens.
Chances are that the problem is solvable by a sufficiently competent tech guru given adequate resources and time. Our current guy cannot with the resources available to him solve the problem in the time he has available for this.
All this a product of the status of our parent companies as companies in dire straits. Until that changes (for the better), solving this is not a priority for those who could assign the resources to solve it. This means, alas, that this annoyance is here to stay.
Where did I say that search doesn’t work AT ALL? Can you quote me on that?
Search is crippled, not broken, and it’s done to protect the main functionality of this board, which is reading and writing posts from and to the database.
There are ways to work around the inherent problems of a massive SQL database, as mentioned, but they are just that, workarounds.
I cannot speak to these other boards you visit, because you do not say what boards they are, nor do you say what type or version of board software they are using, not do you state what sort of backend database is employed, nor do you state the server resources available to those boards, nor do you provide any insight whatsoever to how those boards accomplished “fixing” their “broken” search engines. Surely you don’t expect me to be clairvoyant.
Ed distilled the problem a couple years ago (in fact that entire thread is relevant). Again, there are solutions, but they involve significant losses in functionality (i.e. no “New Posts” function), or require code hacking, or require additional hardware, or a combination of the three.
As discussed in the previous thread, TPTB once upon a time experimented with a reduced window in between searches, and some (one?) enterprising member(s) of the community decided to take maximum advantage of the reduced window and ended up causing the boards to go down completely, thus nixing the idea of a permanent reduction in that window.
As a database guy for a living, I laugh at the idea that 11 million of anything is large. Those 11 million posts would need to generate 100 rows each before I even raised my eyebrows, and I’d still say they could be hosted by a fairly robust desktop computer nowadays (of they type costing 4 - 6K). And while I despise MySQL for being so prolific despite its ludicrous shortcomings, I have to say that MySQL is probably not the problem.