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You Sunk My Ego-Search!

naporeonnaporeon Seattle, WARegistered User regular
So, uhhh...yeah. This is embarrassing, but I guess I might as well be straight-up about it. When did we change our character minimum for the search function?

I used to be able to ego-search using "nap*"; either we used to have a three-character minimum, or that wild-card asterisk was counting as a fourth character.

I assume that our index was just getting unwieldy. So, were our search times getting disagreeably long, or was it a matter of space? Or both? Or alternatively, am I just on crack?

Oh, and lastly, is there any chance that this was a temporary move?

Didn't think so.

naporeon on

Posts

  • ThanatosThanatos Registered User regular
    edited September 2007
    That wild-card character was counting as a fourth character. It was overloading the servers.

    Thanatos on
  • naporeonnaporeon Seattle, WARegistered User regular
    edited September 2007
    Thanatos, I thought we talked about that arrangement where you don't ever tell me things that make me sad.

    naporeon on
  • RamiusRamius Joined: July 19, 2000 Administrator, ClubPA admin
    edited September 2007
    All wildcard searches are disabled until further notice.
    Search times were routinely getting into the 30+ second range, and that is a problem.
    I do expect it to be a temporary move.

    Ramius on
  • EchoEcho ski-bap ba-dapModerator mod
    edited September 2007
    naporeon wrote: »
    I used to be able to ego-search using "nap*"; either we used to have a three-character minimum, or that wild-card asterisk was counting as a fourth character.

    So you're the guy to blame for all slowdowns.

    Echo on
  • naporeonnaporeon Seattle, WARegistered User regular
    edited September 2007
    Ramius wrote: »
    All wildcard searches are disabled until further notice.
    Search times were routinely getting into the 30+ second range, and that is a problem.
    I do expect it to be a temporary move.
    Ah. Thanks for the heads up, and the good news.
    Echo wrote: »
    naporeon wrote: »
    I used to be able to ego-search using "nap*"; either we used to have a three-character minimum, or that wild-card asterisk was counting as a fourth character.

    So you're the guy to blame for all slowdowns.
    Errrrrr...perhaps. Look, it's like this, see...I...uhhhh...well...I don't post as much as I used to, and a lot of my Seattle friends post here, so I like to check to see if there are plans being made for lunch, or, say, to watch Weaver get drunk and try to BBQ.

    Also, I thought for a moment that I'd made the "your/you're" gaffe. Phew.

    naporeon on
  • MKRMKR Registered User regular
    edited September 2007
    Ramius, how big a load would be added by just letting Google index the forums and use a site search?

    There's something you can throw in robots.txt to force googlebot to slow down, but I forget the syntax.

    MKR on
  • stigweardstigweard Registered User regular
    edited September 2007
    I must have been misinformed, or just delusional. I thought the forums were blocked from being indexed because they didn't want PA being associated with forum content.

    stigweard on
  • MKRMKR Registered User regular
    edited September 2007
    stigweard wrote: »
    I must have been misinformed, or just delusional. I thought the forums were blocked from being indexed because they didn't want PA being associated with forum content.

    That seems like it would be an odd reason. It seems to me that the forums are what make PA great - no matter what you're in to, you'll find a forum you can get in to.

    MKR on
  • RamiusRamius Joined: July 19, 2000 Administrator, ClubPA admin
    edited September 2007
    For a long time we did block it because we didn't want to pollute the www.penny-arcade.com namespace and pagerank with forum content.

    Now that we are on a subdomain, forums.penny-arcade.com, we should be OK, but I'm NOT going to let google get access unless/until we have some sort of caching headers sent with the pages. Otherwise, google has no hints on whether a given page of a given thread has changed or not.

    The "right thing" to do, really, is to write out old threads into static-HTML archive files and allow those to be indexed by the big search engines.

    But google is cannot let me say, "show me posts made by MKR between July-Aug 2007". google will never be quite as complete of a search as what I can provide here. So there is a search engine I would like to get setup on the server which can interface with the mysql database and can index metadata about all the posts providing practically all of the functionality of the current search page. The catch is, its current version only works well when reading data out of a MySQL database. This search engine is not yet setup on the servers and the timeframe for when it might be setup is both unknown to me and out of my control.

    If I export archives to disk but leave all the data in the database, then people using the current search will still have a slowing effect on the system. If I export archives to disk but remove them from the database, then I won't be able to get it into the new search system later. It is for this reason that I've let the problem go as long as it has. But It's been getting pretty bad lately, and I don't think I can wait on the new search system any longer.

    So, my interim solution, I think, will be to export archives to disk and then export from the database either into another database, or a series files that can be re-imported into the database at a later time. Then let google and the other search engines in to provide some sort of searching of the archives, but hopefully re-import and re-index the data later so that we can keep full-fidelity search of our content.

    Ramius on
  • RamiusRamius Joined: July 19, 2000 Administrator, ClubPA admin
    edited September 2007
    Also,
    MKR wrote: »
    It seems to me that the forums are what make PA great

    I think some several-hundred-thousand PA fans would disagree with you. We do alright for traffic here at the forums, but to say that anyone interested in PA would be interested in what's going on here as well seems empirically false simply based on the fact that PA mainsite unique visitors absolutely dwarfs ours.

    Ramius on
  • MKRMKR Registered User regular
    edited September 2007
    This might sound a bit nuts, but given the reach of PA, a lot of people at Google probably read the comic and forums. Have you considered talking to the people at Google about coming up with a solution? They might be able to overcome the "can't limit by x, y or z criteria" issue.

    MKR on
  • MKRMKR Registered User regular
    edited September 2007
    Ramius wrote: »
    Also,
    MKR wrote: »
    It seems to me that the forums are what make PA great

    I think some several-hundred-thousand PA fans would disagree with you. We do alright for traffic here at the forums, but to say that anyone interested in PA would be interested in what's going on here as well seems empirically false simply based on the fact that PA mainsite unique visitors absolutely dwarfs ours.

    I probably should have tossed a qualifier in there saying that's what makes it great to me. Whoops.

    MKR on
  • jothkijothki Registered User regular
    edited September 2007
    MKR wrote: »
    This might sound a bit nuts, but given the reach of PA, a lot of people at Google probably read the comic and forums. Have you considered talking to the people at Google about coming up with a solution? They might be able to overcome the "can't limit by x, y or z criteria" issue.

    But then the riffraff might read our posts!

    jothki on
  • TDLTDL ClubPA, __BANNED USERS regular
    edited September 2007
    So, I'm assuming that changing it to be able to search for three letter words would not be an easy fix?

    TDL on
    Meet me on my vast veranda
    My sweet, untouched Miranda
    And while the seagulls are crying
    We fall but our souls are flying
  • devoirdevoir Registered User regular
    edited September 2007
    It's an easy fix, the problem is the load it induces on the servers because of the indexing involved.

    devoir on
  • NibbleNibble Registered User regular
    edited September 2007
    It would be nice if the forums could index certain specific, common keywords that are less than four characters long -- such as Wii, DS, GBA, PS2, etc.

    Just sayin

    Nibble on
    sig.php?id=178
  • MeizMeiz Registered User regular
    edited September 2007
    TDL wrote: »
    So, I'm assuming that changing it to be able to search for three letter words would not be an easy fix?

    Signing your posts would be an easy fix.

    I think it ignores signatures but you could always do it in the body of the message.

    Meiz on
  • MKRMKR Registered User regular
    edited September 2007
    Meiz wrote: »
    TDL wrote: »
    So, I'm assuming that changing it to be able to search for three letter words would not be an easy fix?

    Signing your posts would be an easy fix.

    I think it ignores signatures but you could always do it in the body of the message.

    How long have you been here? :P

    He would be jumped on if he manually signed posts.

    MKR on
  • TDLTDL ClubPA, __BANNED USERS regular
    edited September 2007
    It's a retarded thing to do, and it also does nothing to fix the fact that I cannot ego search. Besides, I can already display all of my own posts, I don't need to sign my own posts to find them.

    TDL on
    Meet me on my vast veranda
    My sweet, untouched Miranda
    And while the seagulls are crying
    We fall but our souls are flying
  • MeizMeiz Registered User regular
    edited September 2007
    Ego searching is pretty retarded to begin with. The only reason I do it is to see if there was a response to anything I've said previously.

    And I'm going to start signing all my posts from now on.

    Meiz - AKA Captain Awesome.

    Meiz on
  • ThanatosThanatos Registered User regular
    edited September 2007
    Meiz wrote: »
    TDL wrote: »
    So, I'm assuming that changing it to be able to search for three letter words would not be an easy fix?
    Signing your posts would be an easy fix.

    I think it ignores signatures but you could always do it in the body of the message.
    He's trying to ego-search. If he wants to know what posts he's made, he just has to click on his profile.

    Thanatos on
  • DynagripDynagrip Break me a million hearts HoustonRegistered User, ClubPA regular
    edited September 2007
    Ramius wrote: »
    All wildcard searches are disabled until further notice.
    Search times were routinely getting into the 30+ second range, and that is a problem.
    I do expect it to be a temporary move.
    What the hell is the deal with your member groups?

    Dynagrip on
  • Garlic BreadGarlic Bread i'm a bitch i'm a bitch i'm a bitch i'm a Registered User, Disagreeable regular
    edited October 2007
    I was just egosearching and it wasn't giving me recent results (like, 20 minutes ago results), but I tried searching for other recent posts and it did them fine

    what's up with this i need to know when people talk about me

    Garlic Bread on
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