Re: Search Engine Question

I got a very fast reply for the admin of the search engine, and he found
the problem so things should work better now. He is also looking for
suggestions for improvements. If you have any ideas please send then to
me (privately at jijones@ix.netcom.com) and I will collect and forward
to him.

I was very impressed with his interest in fixing the problem.


Christopher P. Lindsey wrote:
> 
> Hi John,
> 
>    I'm able to duplicate these errors.  I'll take a look at it and
>    see if I can track down the source of these false matches.
> 
>    Just as an aside, I'm going to be rewriting the search engine
>    to provide a lot more functionality in the next week or so.  Things
>    that will be included are:
> 
>       o Ability to limit searches by date
>       o Display the first n matches instead of saying that there are
>         too many
>       o Highlighting the matched words in red for messages that match
> 
>    Is there anything else that you'd like to see in the search engine?
> 
>    It's funny -- I just sent mail to AltaVista's webmaster this
>    afternoon because of a bug in their search engine -- I guess
>    what goes around comes around!  :)
> 

and later he wrote:

> I'm embarassed to say that it's my fault -- a programming error in
> the search engine.  I've corrected it, and I'm surprised that nobody
> noticed sooner!  Because the search engine supports the words 'AND', 
> 'OR', and 'NOT' when doing matches, it thought that you were looking
> for 'OD OR ATISSIMA'.  Because it only wanted a whole word match,
> it didn't find things that were matching before.  I changed the
> search engine to check for a space on either side of the 'OR',
> so this shouldn't happen again.
> 
> Sorry about the confusion, and thanks for the heads-up!


John                     | "There be dragons here"
                         |  Annotation used by ancient cartographers
                         |  to indicate the edge of the known world.

John Jones, jijones@ix.netcom.com
Fremont CA, USDA zone 8/9 (coastal, bay) 
Max high 95F/35C, Min Low 28F/-2C average 10 days each
Heavy clay base for my raised beds.
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