Advanced Search is now in production. Of course, post any errors here, but when doing so, let me know all of the criteria you were using, especially the words you were searching for.
It's available on the homepage as a link in the 1st column.
Some basics about how it works:
1. Only Premium-PLUS and renewable-subscription members have access to it. That means Grandfathered and old Lifetime members don't have it unless they've bought the Premium-PLUS upgrade. If your "UserLevel" at the bottom of the screen isn't 20 or higher, you don't have access to it and it'll prompt you to upgrade your membership level.
2. There are a number of criteria you can use to build your search. 7 of them, to be exact. The first 3 are dropdowns based on your SubjectMarks and PeopleMarks. You can choose Authors or Recipients as "All Authors" or "All Recipients" or all of the ones you have SubjectMarked or PeopleMarked, or select individuals from your SubjectMarks and PeopleMarks.
3. You can't search the entire message database in one search. You can, however, select a year for your search. All messages are searchable. But you have to specify a year for each search.
4. If you leave item 7 blank, it'll use all the other criteria but not pay attention to what words are contained in the messages. Handy if you just want to see, for example, all of the posts you wrote to a specific thread in a specific year. Or to a specific person no matter what thread. There are many possibilities.
5. If you use common words like "for", "and", "the", etc in item 7, those words *should* neatly get ignored. So, a search on "to the moon" should turn into a search only on the word "moon" because "to" and "the" are what we call "noise" words. They're so common that it's extremely inefficient to index them for searching.
There are some minor tweaks remaining that need to be done to Advanced Search, such as being able to jump to the next 100 results, but let's use it as-is for a while to make sure the basic model of it works well. It's still very much up in the air whether how well it's going to work given the enormous size of the message table. Currently, searches are not terribly speedy, but I'm hoping they'll get faster as they get used more often and the cache starts coming into play more. |
