Search should be functional on the Dev site now.
Some relevant info about it:
1. If you're not logged in, a limited version of it is available only on the homepage. If you're logged in and the site sees you as a Premium member (which is currently the case for everyone logged in there), the search box is at the top where a banner ad would otherwise be, and it has no limitations.
2. There isn't yet any pre-filtering to make sure "noise" words aren't used. Noise words are words like "and", "or", "because", which are excluded from search indexing since they appear too often to be useful. If you perform such a search, the system won't elegantly trap the problem. Yet. But no harm will be done, either.
3. Currently, the 100,000 newest private messages are available to search.
4. Currently, the 1 million newest public messages are available to search.
5. There is a display bug for search results that have the "<" symbol in the beginning of them. The same bug used to be present on the Subject page, but was fixed, and the same fix still needs to be applied to Search and Inbox listings.
Keep in mind that this is a rudimentary version of Search. There is a lot of work to be done to it to add quite a few more features, many of which will be part of the featureset available only to recent recurring-type subscribers or lifetime and grandfathered members who ante up the nominal annual extra-feature fee. An example of this is that though this version of Search returns up to 50 results, the extra-feature version will allow paging through groups of 50 results, and allow searching of the entire messagebase by year or million-message interval, whichever I decide will be less abusive to the system.
Edit: Please don't submit any feature requests for Search. Believe me, I'm already way ahead of ya on those items. Dev could very well become Production before more features get added to Search, but I've got a HUGE list of things I already know I'm adding to it. As I've said before, Search is 1 of the 3 core functionalities a message board must do well, so it will become very feature-rich. |
