Free Republic Search Engine *Experimental*

Search Free Republic ^

[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.

[My Favorite Headache]

John I love it...it rules!

[BADJOE]

It found a post(article ) I wrote in early 98 very quickly. I have tried to find it before and had not been able to do so, till now. Thank you.

[xm177e2]

I just wanna know if this thing is going to melt the server.

You could always put this on a different server, couldn't you? Or could you set limits on the bandwidth/computational power allowed for this function?

[flamefront]

http://www.freerepublic.com/perl/search?s=china+chinese+beijing+taiwan+russia+moskow+taipei&ok=Search&m=any&o=time

looks good! Great work getting relevance.

Now about 'author, source, date, by, from, to' searches?

[68-69TonkinGulfYachtClub]

Thank You for ALL you do.

[mattdono]

Very fast. I would suggest changing the second drop down to read a little different. Maybe "By date/time posted" instead of "By time posted".

Not being picky, just offering a thought.

Other than that, looks great!

[anymouse]

Thanks again JimRob!

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Quick!

[flamefront]

Oh-oh, only complete literal complete names, no partial name matches and plurals have to be explicitly entered separately.

[The Duke]

Hey, is this using MySQL's 'TEXT-QUERY' searches?

I'm just starting to get into that myself...so inquiring minds really want to know!!! *G*

[RedBloodedAmerican]

I couldnt get the search by exact phrase to work. But then I don't know if the article is on the server.

[Inspector Harry Callahan]

This search engine reaches WAAAAAAY back! Great new feature.

[68-69TonkinGulfYachtClub]

Research help PING

[RedBloodedAmerican]

Wow, that rocks. I got FAST returns on some.

[Brett66]

I like the new features. What about integrating it into posting articles. If someone tries to post "I'm a Bad American" it could do a search, come up with the results and tell the poster to stop posting it. ;)

[John Robinson]

I'm using MySQL FULLTEXT indexing.

select * from table where match(field) against ('query string')

Works pretty good on FR main! It was dog slow on my development machine, but then again, my development machine is dog slow.

I'm still using the MySQL 3.23 series. Once 4.0 proves itself on the streets, these searches will be able to utilize the much improved 4.0 feature set and should be quicker to boot.

[Libertina]

BUMP This is a wonderful Christmas present for FReepers :)I've been wanting this feature for sooooo long! Thanks Jim, I hope it works out because it's great.

[jude24]

Would it be possible to make it so that when we're replying to a post, we can see it instead of having to right click "open in new window" to be able to refer to the post we're talking about??

Might make for better replies.

[LBGA]

Hiya CG!!! I have been missing in action here lately, but this new feature looks good enough to help me past those "uuuhhhh" moments. ;-)

[John Robinson]

I tested it fully on my development machine, which contains an exact replica of Free Republic if only a few days stale. (And let me tell you how eerie it is late at night on the development machine with absolutely NO traffic. Spooky man!)

The real test is getting the code out on the live machine, with so many other tasks competing for resources, the most important being the database engine's attention.