Except that Google has only a gross approx. of 170K threads indexed, while 41 by itself has almost that many threads. BF doesn't employ any sitemaps or sitemap deltas or pinging of Google either, so Googlebots will only crawl at whatever speed they want to and at the frequency that they feel like.

google also won't necessarily find content within a thread, so you still might have to search endless pages using the BF search.

It also wont let you pick which forums to look in, or threads from specific posters. The bottom line is that there is nothing wrong with he BF search, it's just that the default parameters and settings suck.

One other thing to keep in mind is that the BF search is literal and the google search is fuzzy.

I've always searched BF this way. I thought everyone did.

they still need to fix some stuff. like that "word is too common" garbage.

Agreed.

It's not using a reverse-index search engine, it's using a database query. These are very expensive for text searches.

Unlikely that they use a mysql query for full text searching. Likely it's something like Sphinx which does full text indexing. BF is WAY too big to be doing fulltext db queries

ok you guys geek out and get them to fix it.

umd you get no respect. You are like the Rodney Dangerfield of BF.
Great info. Thanks.

That's what the PM feature is for. Simply ask.

Thanks umd, good posting.

I agree the intuitive way to search yields sucky/useless results.

Let's see if this results in fewer postings of frequently asked questions....I hope so, but not holding my breath!

see above

Agreed. I learned something today!

Community service.

Thanks for the info!

I'd like to vote for this to be a sticky (which is sort of sad that there has to be a thread to explain how to use search in the first place).

Either way, gj umd.

Oh, I don't know about that. Try doing a search with normal search operations 'and' or 'or'. Notice anything about the highlighting when you click through to a result? From a quick search trying to find what vbulletin 4 uses for a search engine and the best I could find was this. Not exactly helpful, but it looks like it's still db based. This thread implies that a lot of people use a sphinx with VB3 and really, really want it for VB4.

Using a database as a search engine is pretty weak. You can do a decent job with some databases such as postgres where you can specify stemmers, stop words, etc but mysql .. nah. It's just bad architecture anyways ... why would you want more load on the db box when you could split out functionality to it's own box? I suppose you could do it with mysql slave db's or something but still it's a poor design choice.

Excellent post umd!

Strongly endorse this as a sticky. The ability to search optimally benefits every individual
member and the BF community by minimizing repetitive threads!

I have no ulterior motive in posting this, other than getting tired of all the people saying that the search sucks.

Sticky this thread!

You can circumvent the common word issue by enclosing your keywords in double quotes. Note that it is case sensitive, so for example if you search for "Seven" you will get different results than "seven" and just seven will complain that it is a common word. I haven't tried but if you search for "a", it may freak out the database. With all the software types here, I thought that this would be common knowledge.


Thanks umd for putting this out.

Is this what kept you busy while banned?

tried. no worky.

No, I typed this up this morning. I thought about when I saw a bunch of search posts while I was banned but the bikesdirect thread this morning and Walter's comment about the search prompted me to finally write it up.

umd for Bike Forum Pet of the Week