Date: Fri, 7 Aug 1998 15:51:06 -0700 (PDT) From: Jason Evans <jasone@canonware.com> To: freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Search engine on web site flakey. Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.980807153346.2126D-100000@orkan.canonware.com>
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I have experienced poor results with the http://www.freebsd.org/search.html search engine. In particular, I have used it many times over the past couple of years to look for information in the mail archives. For the last 9 months I have been subscribed to many of the lists, and I specifically remember email messages that I can not get the search engine to find. Here are the problems I think I'm seeing: 1) Threads seem to be disjoint. If i find a message from a thread, I can't find all of the messages that originally belonged to the thread. 2) Searches apparently don't include the mail headers in the search. This makes a whole slew of searches impractical. 3) Sorting could use secondary sorting, so that it would be possible to find all articles by an author, sorted by date. 4) Limiting the number of results apparently causes the search engine to stop as soon as it finds N results, then sort them. Instead, all matches should be found, sorted, then the first N displayed. I'm guessing that 4) is the root of most of the evil I'm experiencing. Any comments? Thanks, Jason P.S. Please keep me CCed, since I'm not subscribed to this list. Jason Evans Email: [jasone@canonware.com] Web: [http://www.canonware.com/~jasone] Home phone: [(650) 856-8204] Work phone: [(408) 774-8007] Quote: ["Invention is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration" - Thomas Edison] To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-doc" in the body of the message
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