Hey folks -
So I noticed a thread a few days ago from Tom Levens, mentioning that Applefritter really does need a better search engine as the current one is tied in with Google, and unless Google is updated all the way (which it usually isn't), you're going to miss results.
It's been over a month since I really sat down to code something, though I'm starting to again. Before I plunged into a larger project I've been working on I decided, "Hey, that can't be to hard."
Anyhow, it needs better sorting, as after the exact phrase matches, it shows results in reverse chronological order, not taking into consideration how many of those words were found in the given comment. I've got a method in mind, which I'll probably put in later tonight.
But for now, I want comments. Especially any suggestions. If it gets good enough, I'll see if I can't convince Tom to replace the Google search with it.
http://www.applefritter.com/fritter/search
-BDub
Looks good!
One thing though... could we have pagination of the results? It seems to display them all on one page currently.
TOM
Any chance of adding a tickbox to search the old forums?
Pagnating the results is going to happen after I get proper sorting sorted out (sorry, couldn't resist). It's not really a hard thing to do, and I have the code sitting on my iBook from another project, so adapting it should be a fairly quick process.
As for searching the old forums, it's possible, but I'd like to talk to Tom about this first. At the moment we're using MySQL database calls to do most of the searching/sorting. The old YaBB forums have text files instead of a database, which makes it quite a bit harder to search. I'm sure I'm not the only one who noticed how the YaBB search function actually took the whole of eternity to come up with results.
What I'd like to do is take those threads, and extract the information from the files into a database, so that it'd be faster to search. But that's going to be a fairly processor intensive thing for a couple hours, and given that AF is dynamically generated, I'd rather get approval from Tom Owad before I run any script which may affect the performance of the site.
However, I'll look at how to do that tonight. It should be fairly simple, from what I've seen of the YaBB files.
Any other comments or suggestions?
-BDub