Searching

[Joe Siegler]

Just ran across a problem with searching. I was trying to find this in search:

War Games

Initially, it was just in the Popular Media forum, but then I tried all the forums, and same result. A completely white screen. Is anyone else seeing this with any other text strings besides that?

[ADM]

Yep I get that as well. Interesting. Haven't you set 3 character words to be ignored in the search options? It's quite intensive on the server.

[Joe Siegler]

Turns out the problem was the word games.

It returned so MANY results that it overloaded the search. As such, I'm removing the word games from the things we can search for. It's a pretty darn generic term anyway.

Had to rebuild the search index, so hopefully this will not be happening anymore. I was seeing a lot of PHP memory errors (which translated into the white screen).

[Usurper]

I wish the search feature wouldn't strip out common words when searching for a phrase.

[Joe Siegler]

I wish the search feature wouldn't strip out common words when searching for a phrase.

There's only about 5 words in there total. And most of them fall under the limit of characters you can search for any way.

[peoplessi]

Well, I didn't see any white screen. I did search before you changed it. "war games", it rightly disregarded word "war" and searched with "games" which returned _a lot_ of results. Not a big loss if one can't search "games", since as mentioned it doesn't really narrow the search down in any way - most of the discussion here is about games.

[ADM]

We did some tests last night and every time me and Joe searched for 'Games' it would white screen and pump out memory errors in the logs. Not sure why it worked for you though and not me and Joe, considering I'm all the way over in Australia and he's in Texas I'd say we're perfect testing subjects (someone being ultra close and another ultra far in location to the server).

Anyway games is such a generic term so no wonder it was taxing the server.

A lot of bigger forums don't even use the search engine provided by vB and opt for a customised google search instead.

[Usurper]

There's only about 5 words in there total. And most of them fall under the limit of characters you can search for any way.

Is "over" one of them? I tried searching the phrase "room over room" in the duke3d mods forum, and it gives me results as if I searched for the keywords room and room.

[Rider]

can't you just enclose that in caps and bypass that limitation?

[Joe Siegler]

The only words in the "can't search for this list" are:

the but or and of games

Come to think of it, or and of can be removed, since they're below the threshold of three characters. Must have been there from when we first started and I don't think I had a limit, or it was set to 2.

[Usurper]

The following words are either very common, too long, or too short and were not included in your search: over

There must be a list of defaults in addition to your custom additions. Oh well.

[Wellenreiter]

I have some trouble with this white screen ATM. I just tried searching for "duke xbox live" (Advanced Search), and lo and behold, the screen is white! I've tried several times. Some hours ago I also had this problem while trying to post a new message. It worked on the fourth or fifth try...

[peoplessi]

Well, I bet it's due "Duke" being so common word, it exists almost in every thread. Also, I get the whitescreen when searching for Duke, so I'd guess that's the problem right there.

[Jinroh]

When I search it doesn't even work, must be IE ;) Nevermind it works now.

[Joe Siegler]

You now can't search for the world Duke here. It's a fairly common word, and searching for Duke here is fairly pointless, anyway. :)

[Wellenreiter]

Yes, I know! All the three words I typed are totally common. Funnily enough though "duke3d xbox live" worked. And I'd think duke3d is rather common, too. ;)

[Jinroh]

You now can't search for the world Duke here. It's a fairly common word, and searching for Duke here is fairly pointless, anyway. :)

Yeah, it's like looking for Duke at The Renaissance Faire. lol.

[wayskobfssae]

I'm removing the word games from the things we can search for.

Is it possible to enable the search to still work with word combinations? I wanted to open a thread for "Game Maker" and wanted to see if a thread already existed. Then remembered this and realized there's no way to check this, and if the thread leaves the first page, that'd be the end of it forever anyway.

[Joe Siegler]

Is it possible to enable the search to still work with word combinations? I wanted to open a thread for "Game Maker" and wanted to see if a thread already existed. Then remembered this and realized there's no way to check this, and if the thread leaves the first page, that'd be the end of it forever anyway.

No I can't block it in the way you ask. It's either in the block, or it's not - there's nothing in the condition for partial.

[Waiter]

Getting the white page by searching for "thread" as well.

I tried searching for "Portal thread" as the name of the thread, but as you can't search for "thread" you'll have to wade through the search results to find it.

[Nessus]

Here's how you search the 3DR forums. Go to google and type site:3drealms.com followed by the search term like so

site:3drealms.com dopefish wolfenstein

Sometimes it comes formatted like an old webpage but for the most part you get better and faster results with this method than the official forum search. Plus why not let google take the cpu load and disk thrashing and save Joe the resources.

[ReadOnly]

I'm usually doing google search. It's easier.

[Joe Siegler]

Has anyone attempted to find out how current that is? Using Google search on our forums would be OK for old stuff, but I would imagine it isn't that "current".

[peoplessi]

I don't agree it being better, since it indeed isn't current and it's cumbersome way of searching. Faster maybe if you have to search something numerous times in short intervals.