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Improved Search

Submitted by bfm on Tue, 2009/06/09 - 19:22
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Here's what's changed:

  • Results are ranked by relevance instead of by date
  • Pagination works properly
  • search by date works. Use the form YYYY-MM-DD or YYYYMMDD
  • Searching now defaults to the Dilbert Strip Finder instead of the site content and comments. This happened several days earlier than the other changes.

The search function is based on MySQL's full text search in natural language mode. That means that boolean operators like AND and OR aren't needed. The gory details are at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/fulltext-natural-language.html if you're interested.

One of the side-effects of the natural language mode is that words which occur in more than half of the indexed items aren't available for searching. The only word that this affects is "Dilbert", ironically enough.

Another side effect is that the sort-by-date link had to be removed, as it caused the initial results to be sorted by date instead of by relevance.

As always, please leave a comment or send me an e-mail with your thoughts on how useful the search is, and how it may be improved.

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