Search by Date

October 15, 2001 12:44 PM

As an alternative to machaus's idea (below) couldn't the search engine be searchable within a date range? For example use the MeFi search just over the past month and let google search the rest.
posted by DBAPaul to Feature Requests at 12:44 PM (2 comments total)

that would seem plausible, paul. it seems that, for the moment, metafilter searches along a linear path; thus for each search request you make, it goes through over 11,000 threads (just for metafilter, not counting metatalk). we also search comments, which makes things over 10x worse; metafilter's comments number over 140,000 i believe. limiting searches to within a month would definitely help. i have to say, though, that i am an idiot when it comes to the google search: i tried to find something, and it reported 15 matches, but only showed 1-6. i could see no way to go to the next page of matches. that's a problem i have with the proposal.

searching could be made more efficient, of course, if we were to somehow index threads by particular keywords. i have no idea how that should be structured, let alone could be implemented, but it's an interesting idea and would definitely help out server load per search as well.

(i'm pretty sure most search engines such as google use keyword indexing, but the process would probably require a ton of keywords. maybe we could streamline the search a bit on mefi's end: say, optionally looking only for threads/comments containing a particular link or domain. we could then index all links outside of metafilter, and search through that -- the result should be pretty good, since we could then employ a much more efficient search algorithm than simply looking at each row in the table.)
posted by moz at 1:36 PM on October 15, 2001

I was also thinking that the overloaded search problem could be ameliorated with a short range search of the past 30 days or similar. Google could take up the slack on longer searches.

I have taken to saving a copy of the page on my own computer and searching it. I kept wanting to look back to something a few days ago and not being able to find it.

In the small feature request category, I would like to see the <base href="http://www.metatalk.com"> tag added to the regular MeFi page. I see that it is in the monthly archives, but not in the current page. (Easy to add on the copy, though). That way the relative links will work properly on a local copy.

Some of us are still on old modems, so we have to think different.


posted by Geo at 7:05 PM on October 20, 2001