NOTICE:
This content is in the "archives" of Gadgetopia. It has been moved to this subdomain as it is no longer considered relevant to the site. It is being hosted here for a indeterminate period of time. Its existence at this URL is not guaranteed, and it may be removed at any time. If you would like to refer to this content in the future, you are encouraged to save it to your local file system.

New Search Engine

Originally published by "dbarker" on 2005-10-21 11:50:00Z

Once again, I’ve been tinkering with the search on this site. We’ve gone through several iterations here, but I think this one is a keeper.

Most recently, I abandoned the SQL-based search system I was using and switched to using Google.

However, much to my surprise, it didn’t work that well. It didn’t return results for terms I knew were in the page I was looking for. I’ve done a little comparison between Google and the new system, and it’s confirmed my suspicions – there are several instances where Google just didn’t pick up on words. Go figure.

The new system is based on Swish-E, which is a phenomenally well-done, open source, indexing engine. It updates once an hour (swallowing 4,500 HTML files in 8 seconds) and it seems to just work, which is refreshing.

Try it out, and let me know if you have any problems or suggestions. I have some pretty cool refinements for the system coming, but I want to get it “in the wild” for a month or two before I start tinkering.