8 posts tagged with search by mathowie.
Displaying 1 through 8 of 8.

Search me!

The new Search is officially live. Full details to follow. [more inside]
posted by mathowie on Jan 31, 2008 - 69 comments

Full -text search indexes go!

So I finally got around to researching full-text search indexes for the database server today. I whipped up some indexes (that are updated hourly) and ran some tests: searches using the indexes were 5-10x faster than the old way. So I brought back tag and post search for logged in users on the search page.

Consider this a test for the next few days, as I would like to bring search back in all sorts of ways (searching a user's posts, favorites, etc), and hopefully this doesn't kill the database server like it has in the past.
posted by mathowie on May 11, 2006 - 35 comments

Pony - best answer search

Another tiny new feature: you can search for just questions with good answers marked at Ask MetaFilter. Here's an example of a search result with this in action.
posted by mathowie on Feb 11, 2005 - 34 comments

Announcing the new search features

NewFeatureFilter: Ask MetaFilter search, and all user pages have Ask MetaFilter history, with Ask MeFi removed from MetaTalk history. This is the tip of the iceberg, several major features will be added this week.
posted by mathowie on Jun 14, 2004 - 15 comments

Help find this 9/11 thread for a reporter

A reporter asked me this question in email, which I couldn't answer. Does this ring a bell for anyone? If so, I'll paypal five bucks to the first person to find the appropriate thread (I'll ask the reporter to pay me some research fees)

"I'm writing to you today to see if you can help me with a search I'm doing or perhaps offer some suggestions. I'm working on a story about emergency dispatchers, and I remember an incredibly affecting thread about 2 months or so after Sept. 11 that had accounts from New York City dispatchers on their experiences that day. I've put every imaginable search term into the Mefi engine ("emergency operator", "operator," "Sept. 11," "911," "dispatcher", etc.) but the search either times out or comes up with nothing."
posted by mathowie on Mar 27, 2002 - 18 comments

To Index or Not?

The site is getting pummelled lately, so I ran stats on the past few days to see if there was a national news story or something. Of the 300k page views in the past four days, 100k, or 1/3 of the traffic was solely due to the googlebot.

It appears that having 13k threads filled with 200k comments of google-loving ascii is acting as some sort of honeypot, attracting the google indexers like mad. Broken down by day, the Googlebot appears to visit over 25k pages at metafilter.com PER DAY. If you look at browser/OS stats, the googlebot visits metafilter more often than all Netscape clients combined. Also, the googlebot exceeds all visits by people using Mac operating systems.

Although I'm impressed with the results (google searches are the #1 referrer), is it worth basically bringing down the machine and keeping humans from being able to access it? If I were to include a robots exlusion file and block all search bots, would the net community be at a loss for not being able to find information discussed here?

I guess the big question is, does the utility of having the site indexed outweigh the problems the indexing causes?
posted by mathowie on Jan 4, 2002 - 32 comments

Guess what kids? The MetaFilter search finally works!

Guess what kids? The MetaFilter search finally works!
posted by mathowie on Nov 3, 2001 - 8 comments

Better search, fewer doubles

I improved the search "previously found" feedback. Here is what you see if you search for something that was posted less than 5 times in the database, and here is what you see if you post a URL that is in there more than that. Hopefully this will cut down on double-posts.
posted by mathowie on Nov 3, 2001 - 9 comments

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