Free Republic Search Engine *Experimental*

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[John Robinson]

I've placed online an experimental search engine. It currently only searches article titles. If the technology proves worthy, I'll try to expand it to search articles and commentary. If it cooks the server, it's outta here.

It has a few interesting features, please give it a whirl.

[Khepera]

So far so good but I would like to have it search the message body. Maybe as a search parameter.

[denydenydeny]

Wow! Here it is, the motherlode of Quidam threads that I've been looking for for years:

Crudele Bombshell

It was total BS, but absolutely riveting to read.

[jimkress]

Works GREAT! Hope we keep it.

[patent]

Thanks for the bump. Like the engine.

[WIMom]

I posted this article "INS Achieves 2-Year Naturalization Program Goals" and did a search for just 'INS' and had no results. I tried the entire title, '2-year', 'Naturalization' and 'Goals' and found the article easily. I then tried FBI, CIA and IRS and had no results.

[John Robinson]

You reminded me of the one horrible limitation of this search engine: it indexes words of a minimum of four characters in length. Not one of those TLA will index. :-(

I will have to document that somewhere.

[ListeningLady]

Thanks so much for this "experiment"! Finally I was able to locate a post made last February that, unfortunately, the "regular" search feature has been failing to pull up.

The post I have been looking for is an "I- was-there-in-person" freeper report that I wrote after attending Bush's first official review of U.S. military troops (i.e. "A Grateful Freeper's Firsthand Account of Our Commander-in-Chief's First Review of the Troops"--posted 2/13/2001.)

I've just been wanting to reread it in the light of recent events--9/11, the war both here and abroad, the on-going threat of terrorism, etc. Thanks to you, I located the post again--and, yes, I do indeed still feel grateful George Bush is our president! The resolve I see on his face on TV today is the same resolve I saw on his face as he with great dignity--and also with great respect for those in uniform--inspected those troops at Ft. Stewart that day.

I'm eternally grateful that he occupies the oval office instead of Al Gore! That statement comes from the heart of one who grew up in Al Gore's daddy's Tennesee and from the heart of a mother who has a son on active duty in the Air Force as I write this. All America should be glad that Bush and not Gore is in charge of this situation. I still realize, as I did in February, that Bush is not perfect--as, indeed, none of us are. But he does have character, something that I think is sadly lacking in Al Gore.

Thanks again so much for helping me to locate my post!

[John Robinson]

MySQL Full-text Search

"Relevance is computed based on the number of words in the row, the number of unique words in that row, the total number of words in the collection, and the number of documents (rows) that contain a particular word."

"Every correct word in the collection and in the query is weighted, according to its significance in the query or collection. This way, a word that is present in many documents will have lower weight (and may even have a zero weight), because it has lower semantic value in this particular collection. Otherwise, if the word is rare, it will receive a higher weight. The weights of the words are then combined to compute the relevance of the row."

Also, "MySQL uses a very simple parser to split text into words. A ``word'' is any sequence of letters, numbers, `'', and `_'. Any ``word'' that is present in the stopword list or just too short (3 characters or less) is ignored."

[WIMom]

Dang, it doesn't like spaces either. I tried INS_ where _ = the space character. Too bad, it leaves out a lot of 3 letter acronyms searches. Otherwise it's great! Can you see my question in #58? What determines the relevance? If I search for Immigration, what makes one article more relevant than another? You message says by word search, is that the number of times the word you are searching for is counted in the article?

[WIMom]

OOPS....... Ignore my last post. Thanks for the answer.

[WIMom]

Thanks for the link! I can use this at work!

[Fiddlstix]

Bump
To "play" with this later J

God Bless

[InvisibleChurch]

thanx!!

[glock rocks]

john, do you suppose you could add a feature that would send anyone who searches for moose or cheese directly to du?

[amom]

Thanks for the heads up. This is very cool.

Thanks JohnRob. :-)

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the heads up!

[mrsmith]

A great search engine AND the old archives!
Tears (of happiness) in my eyes John!

[doug from upland]

Wow! Thank you, John. I have found hundreds of songs I thought I had lost forever after a computer crash.

[KMG365]

John, let me kiss your ass too!

[Utah Girl]

Thought you might find this interesting...