Search Timeouts October 17, 2001 7:03 AM   Subscribe

It seems that both myself and Qubit are wondering about the search timing out. I did a MeFi Google search to see if anyone had recently linked e-sheep, and it looked safe. Little did I know. As per Qubit, why does the Metafilter specific search engine time out consistently, letting dumbasses like myself double post?
posted by arielmeadow to Etiquette/Policy at 7:03 AM (10 comments total)

Variations on this question has been posted to Metatalk about 40000000000000 times in the past few days.

<summary>The search engine is overloaded. Matt is looking into solutions.</summary>
posted by daveadams at 7:23 AM on October 17, 2001


OH GOD--Even my question is a doublepost! Ok, I'm really REALLY going to have to shut up now.
posted by arielmeadow at 7:36 AM on October 17, 2001


ariel:

the thing is that metafilter has over 11,000 threads and 140,000 comments on metafilter alone, and each search query goes through the text of each of those looking for instances of the words you chose to search for. it's not a very efficient process, and it's probable that matt's looking at a solution for it when and if he has time on his hands.

as to the reason why now and not before, i think it's because both comments and threads have spiked pretty highly of late, as have new users, and many more people are viewing metafilter than even a month or so ago.
posted by moz at 8:27 AM on October 17, 2001


OH GOD

It's okay ariel, just thought I should point it out to save too much rediscussion.
posted by daveadams at 11:42 AM on October 17, 2001


one solution to this problem is human: posters to metafilter should be required to actually read metafilter.

the previous link to e-sheep, in this case, was the day prior. i'm just saying.
posted by palegirl at 11:44 AM on October 17, 2001


Maybe we should just shut up and learn to love double posts.
posted by fuq at 12:44 PM on October 17, 2001


Maybe we should just shut up and learn to love double posts.
posted by fuq at 12:44 PM on October 17, 2001


That’s damn funny fuq.

Ha ha. Uh. I, on the other hand, am not.
posted by gleemax at 2:16 PM on October 17, 2001


Palegirl, I think your comment crossed with Moz's comment sums up the problem: Metafilter has swelled to such a size that it's a full-time job to read everything and ensure that it hasn't already been posted. And there's so much posted that the metafilter search engine can't do it either.

I read maybe two-thirds of the front page posts, and I even did a CTRL-F search for the words "e-sheep" and "The Spider" on the front page, but that didn't help me find a link to a different e-sheep cartoon that didn't referrence e-sheep in the posting text.
posted by arielmeadow at 3:50 PM on October 17, 2001


posters to metafilter should be required to actually read metafilter.

If they read it enough, will their spelling improve?

And will there be a test afterwards?
posted by rushmc at 5:35 PM on October 17, 2001


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