BoardsSearch.website

Nehpets

Someone said in another thread that the search on this site was nearly as useful as Google. This got me thinking.

Boards.ie could create a new site, maybe BoardsSearch.ie or something similar. It could be a search engine just for this site. Money could be brought in from advertising to pay for it and probably make profit. It could be hosted on another server so it doesn't actually slow down the forum.

Flawless plan imo, since the search is obviously missed and people will use it.

Example. I am looking for a place to go play miniture golf in dublin. This would be pretty hard to find on google, and even then it would probably relate back to boards.ie. So instead I go to BoardsSearch and search it for a topic.

Opinions?

ecksor

Well, we're in the process of buying new hardware, so we should be soon providing the search facility again hopefully!

challengemaster

nice one ecksor \o/

Nehpets

That's cool, but the extra search site would still be good imo.

Talliesin

Well, the practicality of that would depend upon the balance of the strain of a search upon the database and the webserver. I'm guessing (but don't actually know, so I'm totally open to correction) that the db gets hit quite hard in a search (indeed the model vBulletin uses for its searches seems designed to reduce the strain on the db at the cost of having a temporary cache of up to 500 results for each "live" search, a decision that would only make much sense if the db was hit hard).

As such, given that we also want to do better than just doing a google search restricted to boards.ie, we'd want to have a separate database just holding potential search terms and relevant posts (or at least threads, but being able to search with a post resolution would of course be nice). Not the smallest project.

Now it's quite likely that ecksor will post in a minute and say "Nope, Talliesin's analysis is based on completely incorrect conjecture" and I don't want to seem like I'm jumping down on your feedback (even if I am right, you came up with a plan, presented it modestly, and all in all fair play to you), but I'm thinking this won't be practical.

ecksor

Someone (not me, maybe it was regi or Cloud) has proposed the idea of moving search so that it would access a read only database kept separate from the main boards database purely just to keep the load off of everyone else's general browsing. I've demonstrated large differences in the past between doing the join across the word index of the vbulletin search system and a naive text search (latter being faster) that would suggest that certain (most as the database gets big) searches are very expensive, but in practice this manifests itself by pushing up the webserver load.

Talliesin

Cool. So if you go with that, and the effect of the webserver load being increased is high then is Nephet's idea a way to deal with that (in which case I'm very happy to be demonstrated to have been wrong above)?

If this is so, a further question to my mind would be whether we could hide this split, so that boards.ie/vbulletin/search/whatever went to this, rather than having to use a different domain and log in separately (bad enough the number of times I accidentally post as my girlfriend because I didn't switch to the domain I'm logged in as [see above those with mod rights on this forum ]).

ecksor

It's hard to say. An awful lot of the casual searching comes from stuff like "show more posts by" and these are popular features amongst users. They don't really want to be searching a database that's 24 hours out of date but nephets idea doesn't mind that so much. That's not to say that perhaps we could feed it off the same database but farm it out to a different webserver and get some benefit. (The short answer here is that I don't know how much benefit we get from any of these ideas without trying them).

markpb

ecksor wrote:

It's hard to say. An awful lot of the casual searching comes from stuff like "show more posts by" and these are popular features amongst users. They don't really want to be searching a database that's 24 hours out of date but nephets idea doesn't mind that so much. That's not to say that perhaps we could feed it off the same database but farm it out to a different webserver and get some benefit. (The short answer here is that I don't know how much benefit we get from any of these ideas without trying them).

I presumed this had been discussed before so I said nothing. MySQL can be made to sync to databases on the fly so every write goes to at least two different servers. DB1 could be the main forum db and DB2 could be used only for searching. All the searches in the world wouldn't affect the main site and even if it did lock the db for a while, it wouldn't matter if it fell a few minutes behind.

Talliesin

ecksor wrote:

It's hard to say. An awful lot of the casual searching comes from stuff like "show more posts by" and these are popular features amongst users.

Your recent work here would seem to suggest that splitting that from the main search is another definite line of enquiry.

ecksor

Yeah, I've seen that option discussed also (but not by me, see above).

ecksor

Talliesin wrote:

Your recent work here would seem to suggest that splitting that from the main search is another definite line of enquiry.

I really only did that work to give the mods something to use.

Talliesin

True, but the fact that boards didn't explode is promising

kraggy

Will it be possible to search for posts/threads that were posted prior to the new hardware being installed?

if so, just for the sake of learning something new, how so? where are old posts stored at the mo?

thanks:)

Talliesin

All the posts are stored in a MySQL database. If we needed another one we'd presumably copy over the old ones.

This isn't a terribly interesting post. I'm trying to remember if the computer the database is on has an amusing name, so as to inject some colour. Alas if it does I cannot bring it to mind.

Random

ecksor wrote:

Well, we're in the process of buying new hardware, so we should be soon providing the search facility again hopefully!

What sorta hardware does it take to run Boards.ie these days?

ecksor

Not quite sure what you're asking there. We'll probably publish specific specs of what we get once it's acquired if that's what you mean.

Random

ecksor wrote:

Not quite sure what you're asking there. We'll probably publish specific specs of what we get once it's acquired if that's what you mean.

I guess I'm asking for the specs, info on the network, connection, setup, etc.

All those geeky things I'd just love to know about

ecksor

Ah, ok, the current specs? Some would say that's not what it takes to run things nowadays!

I think the History entry on the wiki is up to date.

Here's a brief description: http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=199212

Nothing terribly exciting really.

quarryman

<EDIT>

i asked questions before actually reading your link correctly...