If there exist inner workings to be known, that right there is evidence that it’s not simple to plug in a different search engine.
Here’s a description in the online manual
Nothin about slapping in some third party search system.
From that link, “By default, vBulletin will use its internal indexing feature. The results of this indexing process is stored in two tables, word and postindex. This provides a fast search mechanism but can cause problems on larger forums due to the ever increasing size of these tables. Each unique word is indexed in the word table and each occurrence of the word is indexed in the postindex table. To get around the large amount of space these tables can occupy we implemented MySQL Fulltext Search.”
From reading that, it appears that MySQL Fulltext Search is more space efficient that the default search mechanism in vBulletin. Thus, leading to faster searches. However, I don’t know if this is included in the current version the board uses.
From the same site as before, check out Search Engine Friendly Archive. vBulletin supports archiving of old threads if the site uses “the Apache web server with PHP compiled as a module”. This means that we could use Google to index and search old threads if server power is an issue.
Just for the sake of knowing, how many megabytes of data does the SDMB create in a typical day?
Um, that’s not at all an obvious conclusion. MySQL’s Full-Text search includes it’s own array of nasty tables, indices and functions.
Well, thanks to Chasing Dreams, here is a cite
So, if I understand correctly, no special programming or hacking is required. Just set this feature to “yes” and run your favorite search engine on the archive.
Hey,
Looks like the archive feature is already turned on. I just realized the archive pages existed. It is a link the the bottom right of each page.
However, there are some issues with the usability of these archived threads. The most important issue is that the archives don’t have a search engine pointed at them. Thus, you can’t search. I believe one of the admins will have to set some parameters in vBulletin so that search engines (ie: Google) have permission to crawl the archive. This should largely mitigate the search performance issues.
The second issue is that archived threads are butt ugly. SDMB members won’t want to use something so hideous compared to the normal threads.
The ugliness issue can be solved too with a bit of creativity. Maybe there is a different style that the admins can use. However, the more elegant solution would be to put a link on a archived thread that points to the unarchived version. Example, the thread “Ack! It was in my kitchen!!!” can be found in the archive under:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/archive/index.php/t-415028.html
The unarchived thread is located at:
You can see that if you know the URL of the archived thread, you also know the URL of the unarchived one. The key is the thread number, in this case it is 415028.
QED
Based on the number of threads in existence at the moment, 324 827, at about 100kb of data on average per thread, I estimate we have about 32-33 gigabytes of user content on the SDMB. Can any admins/mods confirm this? This is a sizable amount of data but nothing stupendously large.
IIRC Google indexing was done once, and has since been disallowed. I think it was right around when they added ads.
Good grief. You do know that the archive is not the same as the database, right? We haven’t been talking about the archive, we’ve been talking about the database. The whole point of the OP was the slow searches for the database. The archive has its own set of issues which people have been complaining about in this forum for quite some time, as threads have been getting moved into it from the database.
Indeed. Reading around in a manual for a few minutes is no substitute for actually knowing what it is you’re talking about.
They aren’t the same? I didn’t know that! You’re a fucking genius! Thanks for that enlightening piece of information.
You know, instead of giving an exasperated and prissy answer, you could have just said “The Search-Friendly Archive does not work as adverstised”, or something like that.
Whoa! Let’s not go to Fist City here.
Whatever personal opinions people may hold on this issue, I sincerely doubt there will be any software changes to the current server.
That being said we’re always interested to hear what people have to say, especially people with some understanding of the hardware and software issues of the message board. So please bring us your ideas and certainly any interesting software you find that could enhance the message board experience for all of us.
Thanks.