Exact Phrase Search June 16, 2008 12:43 AM   Subscribe

Looks like you're searching for an exact phrase. The local search doesn't do that so well. Why not?
posted by sluglicker to Bugs at 12:43 AM (34 comments total)

Mostly 'cause he's a lazy, corrupt, drunken slob who folks in the county voted for 'cause they remember when his daddy was in charge. If you want some complicated searching done around these parts, you got to call in the outside help.
posted by dersins at 1:05 AM on June 16, 2008 [2 favorites]


It's a local search, for local people.
posted by Abiezer at 1:12 AM on June 16, 2008 [6 favorites]


You're all invited back next week to this locality,
To have a heapin' helpin' of their hospitality!
posted by flapjax at midnite at 2:39 AM on June 16, 2008


The locals already know. If you have to ask, well then you must not be from around these parts.
posted by Meatbomb at 2:43 AM on June 16, 2008


Don't you know? Google has a patent on that and #1 doesn't want to pay the crazy exorbitant licensing fees.

I could be wrong, but I think that exact phrase queries put a bit more strain on the server than just plain simple ones. I manage a website that has this problem as well.

Or it's a ColdFusion thing.

Or a lazy programmer thing.

or both.
posted by chillmost at 3:20 AM on June 16, 2008


*cough*

oh man, that chronic cough is a little worrying...
posted by quonsar at 4:26 AM on June 16, 2008 [1 favorite]


I think that exact phrase queries put a bit more strain on the server than just plain simple ones

That was pb's explanation when this issue was brought up previously*. He did say that it was on the list of features to add though.

*found via search
posted by burnmp3s at 4:26 AM on June 16, 2008


Phrase searches swamp the server, or they did when we first tried rolling them out. Google does these well and has a pretty decent index of the site, so we figured this was an okay compromise.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 4:56 AM on June 16, 2008


Welcome to 2008 where smart people have written stupidly fast fulltext search programs that don't nuke the database.
posted by Skorgu at 5:14 AM on June 16, 2008 [2 favorites]


We don't take kindly to no "exact phrases" 'round here.
posted by Eideteker at 5:45 AM on June 16, 2008


This is actually a very indirect attempt to discourage scare quotes.
posted by cortex (staff) at 6:13 AM on June 16, 2008


discourage scare quotes.

I saw Matt hanging out with the Yahoo Answers people!!
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 7:08 AM on June 16, 2008




discourage scare quotes.

I saw Matt hanging out with the Yahoo Answers people!!


I'm pretty sure you meant:

I saw Matt "hanging out" with the Yahoo Answers people!!
posted by SlyBevel at 8:19 AM on June 16, 2008


How do you feel about Looks like you're searching for an exact phrase?
posted by blue_beetle at 8:19 AM on June 16, 2008


"Scare quotes"
posted by quin at 8:19 AM on June 16, 2008


Yahoo "Answers"
posted by burnmp3s at 8:29 AM on June 16, 2008


I'm just really sarcastic when I search.
posted by Artw at 8:48 AM on June 16, 2008


It's all a conspiracy to get us to use Google more so that we become stupid faster.
posted by Tehanu at 9:11 AM on June 16, 2008


Yahoo "Answers" "people"
posted by carsonb at 9:13 AM on June 16, 2008


I'm pretty sure you meant:

"You're right!"
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 9:21 AM on June 16, 2008


Thanks all, and sorry I didn't find the Feb. post before I made this one. I hadn't heard of swish-e or Solr. I'll read those later. And no, I'm not from around here. I'm from New York.
posted by sluglicker at 9:23 AM on June 16, 2008


Make sure you're using smart scare quotes: &lscar;/&rscar;
posted by Eideteker at 9:39 AM on June 16, 2008


¿Why must we do this?
¡Stop the insanity!
posted by lukemeister at 9:48 AM on June 16, 2008


I thought we called those "paraphrase quotes."
posted by klangklangston at 2:48 PM on June 16, 2008


I thought we called those "paraphrase quotes."

Summary quotes is apparently what they call them in livejournalism school.
posted by dersins at 2:53 PM on June 16, 2008


pb, if you guys are worried that this might be too much trouble to implement, let me say that when I last evaluated Lucene 1-1/2 years ago it was dead easy to set up and get running. I haven't tried Solr yet, but it's built on Lucene and looks to be even easier to use than Lucene was back then. And load shouldn't be a problem once the initial indexing is finished. Might be worth checking out.

(Searching directly against your live database used to be really common. But nowadays the conventional wisdom is that you instead have an offline batch process build a big fat index and search against that instead. It works well for the kind of data typically embodied in websites: mostly textual with simple access control.)
posted by sdodd at 3:00 PM on June 16, 2008


Solr on Jetty is pretty easy to set up once you bend your brain around some of the java configuration requirements and its complete lack of error messages (yes, thank you for 20 lines of stack trace. Now tell me what @#$% file you were looking for!). I've not really got an idea of what actually using it is like, but I have set it up for fairly important (though not terribly high volume) production sites.
posted by Skorgu at 5:42 PM on June 16, 2008


I think that exact phrase queries put a bit more strain on the server than just plain simple ones

If you stupid fucks would purge the inactive accounts we wouldn't have this goddamn problem.
posted by Kwantsar at 6:25 PM on June 16, 2008 [1 favorite]


huh...vicious.
posted by jacalata at 12:16 AM on June 17, 2008


BTW, how often does Google hit the front page?

I'd guess once every 15 minutes or so.
posted by ryanrs at 2:19 AM on June 17, 2008


I've seen hour-old MeFi posts on Google before.

Google really likes us apparently.
posted by Pope Guilty at 2:59 AM on June 17, 2008


how often does Google hit the front page?

Well, 6 years ago the Googlebot accounted for a full third of the site's traffic. I think that's gone down considerably since then, due to nofollow bot management and heartfelt pleas to ease up back when server load was a real issue. mathowie mentions here (again, a few years old) that Google Reader hits the AskMe front page a couplefew times a day.
posted by carsonb at 4:24 PM on June 17, 2008


More recently, Google has being doing kind of a shit-hot job of snagging syndicated stuff quickly, so stuff shows up in not even hours but minutes often times. It borders on creepy, but it's pretty great.
posted by cortex (staff) at 4:34 PM on June 17, 2008 [1 favorite]


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