Don't Waste Time on Fedora Mailing List Archive Searches - Search Engine Broken

Mark Weaver mdw1982 at mdw1982.com
Tue Mar 15 00:53:40 UTC 2005


M. Fioretti wrote:

> Correct, I know that. This is not the case with the search engine of
> the current archives, but certainly is with Google. However:
> 
> 0) "I can make a mess because somebody else will surely clean up"???
> 
> 
>>by virtue of the fact that there are simply "more" keywords to 
>>search on.
> 
> 
> 1) "More" is relative. If there is one complete description out of 1 MB
>    of archive or ten copies of it in 10 MB the search result is just as
>    good. But happens _faster_.
> 
> 2) The time wasted manually scrolling web pages or the original
>    messages into an inbox, to search where the one line of new
>    information may be, remains. That is not a personal preference, is
>    a fact. And, in my experience, is quite more than the time waiting
>    for Google to find the initial point. Sorry, my fault to not have
>    specified before that I also thought to manual search of the
>    relevant parts,  _after_ some search engine made a result list.
> 
> Yes, of course this behavior on lists makes me grumpy. That's why
> I posted :-). Because one or two extra seconds when posting can save a
> *lot* of time to everybody who will need that message in the future
> (**).
> 
>   Ciao,
> 	Marco
> 
> (**) ... and a lot of people can still access the Internet only by
> pay-per-minute or pay-per-byte dialup. And even more should soon find
> themselves in the same boat with mobile access, just on a much smaller
> screen. It would be interesting to calculate how much MONEY those
> users are forced to spend by behavior like yours, but this is another
> story.
> 

point taken. Although its starting to sound as though the search engine 
being used for the fedora core archives is quite deficient and posts are 
not very well indexed at all. Since I don't know the process they're 
using to accomplish this I can only speculate.

However, that being said what I "can" do is create a searchable index of 
the archive files remotely and make it available to the list members to 
test my theory.

When its ready I'll post the URL back here and anyone and all are more 
than welcome to try it out.
-- 
Mark
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