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http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/search.php
As many of you may have noticed, there are times when pages on TL sit there and take upwards of 20, 30 seconds to load. This is due to the crappy MySQL search we currently use, where for the duration of a search, reads from the DB block after a write. Obviously this problem would only get worse as the amount of content increased, so I rewrote the search feature.
Our new search engine is based on Sphinx and completely eliminates any dependency on the database (after indexing), making searches have minimal impact on site performance. It's also a hell of a lot better than MySQL fulltext.
New Features:
- Much faster searching, no extra load on the TL DB.
- No restrictions on search terms - common words, short words, etc all allowed.
- Full unicode support - searching in Hangul or Chinese should find any relevant posts.
- Word forms - multiple words that map to the same term, eg searching for "muta" will also find "mutalisk", "fbh" will include "firebathero", etc. The TL staff have built a small list, we may take suggestions for additional wordforms.
- Special characters [ and ] are now part of words to help search for names with clan tags as well as all the TL topic tags such as [MSL] or [G].
- A few exceptions to special characters have been added to allow you to search for some common words with special characters, eg D+, C- (all iccup ranks) and a few other random things used on the forums.
Known Issues / Disadvantages:
- Updates are no longer real-time. Search is primarily used to help locate older posts; Sphinx does not support index updates so updates to the search index will happen on an hourly (depending on server load) basis. We are discussing alternatives for those of you who are search-happy with your own username.
- Once a post is indexed, it's indexed. If a post is edited after the search engine has indexed it, any changes in the edit will not be searchable. Get your post right first time!
- A maximum of 1000 results are returned for any search.
Please post any bugs or feedback in this thread, if you complain about something in the Known Issues section something bad might happen!
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ouch at the edit part 
still a huge update with great features
tyty TL.net
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Ya too bad on the edits part, I have a few questions mainly out of curiosity (I also know nothing about Sphinx).
How long did the initial indexing take? Too long to do an occasional complete reindex to catch edits (this is a pretty inelegant solution either way so I don't blame you if you don't want to do it)?
Also how are posts stored internally? I'm guessing there's no "last_modified" column or something that would allow you to reindex edited posts more conveniently (and even then an unindexed last_modified would still require table scans which you might want to avoid).
But if posts have IDs, maybe you could have a separate new log of the IDs of posts as they are edited and then rollup the log for reindexing on occasion?
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w00t! The limitations of the old search have time and again stumped me. Thanks heaps!
TL skates again :D
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Good job R1CH. This sounds like a big improvement.
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The full reindex takes about 30 minutes at present, something we'd rather avoid since it essentially kills TL during the process since it needs so much data from the DB. There is a last modified column, however the problem is the data format used by Sphinx for indexes cannot be changed - to change one post in the index would require a full index rebuild. Additionally, Sphinx requires unique document IDs - if a edited post were marked to be indexed by the update index, Bad Things™ would happen.
I really don't think it's as big an issue as you think, most edits are made within a few minutes of a post being posted and there's a low chance it would get indexed in that timeframe.
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Nice.
Btw it still doesnt search common words.
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Oh wow, nice!!! Good job!!
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On December 23 2009 16:33 Highways wrote:
Nice.
Btw it still doesnt search common words.
Such as?
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R1CH, alternatively you could implement a data layer inbetween where you stuff all new and changed posts in a separate database or as plain files, and let full reindexing loose on the offline data. That way the TL database only gets hit where necessary and Sphinx can do its thing. There's still the issue of processor time if that's a concern, though.
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On December 23 2009 16:36 R1CH wrote:Show nested quote +On December 23 2009 16:33 Highways wrote:
Nice.
Btw it still doesnt search common words. Such as?
Lol my bad
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Works fine for me, looks like you didn't read the OP.
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Fucking awesome. Thanks r1ch!
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Awesome work R1CH <3
The edit part is kind of sad, but this is still an awesome update.
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Mystlord
United States10264 Posts
The indexing part is what scares me of this new search feature. If it's on an hourly basis and indexing takes ~30 minutes, that's a lot of time used to index everything. When you were indexing everything today, the slowdown was immense. TL took ages to respond.
I'm ambivalent about this. If there's a way to reduce the indexing time, then I'd be all for it.
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Mystlord, only a full index run takes half an hour. An update with new items should take considerably less time.
R1CH, the matching algorithm is very hard. There is no room for spelling errors and there is no partial matching (partial matching could be seen as a spelling mistake, a lighter form). Any options for Sphinx to enable that? Or do you think that feature is not worthwhile?
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Spelling suggestions are something I've considered adding at a later date. Infix (partial) matching on a word is supported, but would substantially increase the index size. I want to see how it performs by default first.
And Mystlord, Badjas is correct. Updates right now takes less than a second, but will grow as more data since the last full index is added. I actually had to index everything four times today to get everything how I wanted it.
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Mystlord
United States10264 Posts
On December 23 2009 16:54 R1CH wrote:
Spelling suggestions are something I've considered adding at a later date. Infix (partial) matching on a word is supported, but would substantially increase the index size. I want to see how it performs by default first.
And Mystlord, Badjas is correct. Updates right now takes less than a second, but will grow as more data since the last full index is added. I actually had to index everything four times today to get everything how I wanted it.
Ok then never mind  . I don't think there are any major problems with the new search engine then. The edit thing might be a problem because we'd lose a lot of new material (I'm thinking updates to topics like Stylish FPVODs and Day[9] podcasts).
Regardless, if I find any bugs, then I'll report them here.
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That's pretty interesting. I've never heard of sphinx before.
I've worked with Lucene extensively in the past, and it has top-notch performance, and it can be coded to address all of your problems. Maybe you can have a look when you are really bored over the holidays. I'll definitely have a look at Sphinx 
Good job re-writing the search engine though!
Regarding the non-edit problem, can't you delete contents from the indices, and then simply re-index edited contents?
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After reading some comments, I have another proposal for stale contents (this is actually what I did with Lucene)
Given that:
Building indices from scratch takes 30 minutes
Incremental updates take much less time
What we can do is keep two sets of indices, call them A and B. Find a time when TL is least busy (i.e. least stress on the server) and call this time T.
We incrementally update one set of indices, A, until time T; at time T, we completely remove the other set of indices, B, and rebuild it from scratch. While B is being built, we obviously still update A, and all search queries will be run against A. After B is complete, we "dump" A, and run all subsequent queries against B. And we switch B with A again at time T. This way, the indices will be 1-day stale in the worst case.
Is this feasible?
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When I say Sphinx indexes can't be modified, I mean it . It is on their todo list for a more flexible index format though. See http://www.sphinxsearch.com/docs/manual-0.9.9.html#conf-mva-updates-pool
EDIT: TL doesn't really have an off-peak time, however the indexer can use a configurable IOPS, iosize and delay so if we want it to take 4 hours to update, it can. Refreshing the index every day like this is certainly possible, but I'd rather avoid it since even with very conservative settings, it's still going to suck up a lot of RAM and IO. Maybe a weekly update is doable.
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Ah that sucks. Hopefully they'll implement that soon
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On December 23 2009 17:10 R1CH wrote:
EDIT: TL doesn't really have an off-peak time, however the indexer can use a configurable IOPS, iosize and delay so if we want it to take 4 hours to update, it can. Refreshing the index every day like this is certainly possible, but I'd rather avoid it since even with very conservative settings, it's still going to suck up a lot of RAM and IO. Maybe a weekly update is doable.
Ha!
edit:
lucene owns~! (maybe sphinx won't pick this up)
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Seriously, we only have on-peak times .
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after squinting: weekly updates on sunday nights?
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Perhaps, I'll need to play around with the indexer options to see if the throttling is effective. A full rebuild would be good every now and then regardless to minimize the size of the delta index.
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Out of curiosity, how long did it take you to write the new indexing service?
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On December 23 2009 17:24 R1CH wrote:
Perhaps, I'll need to play around with the indexer options to see if the throttling is effective. A full rebuild would be good every now and then regardless to minimize the size of the delta index.
It would probably improve performance as well. Lucene definitely didn't like incremental indexing (and updates) as much as I'd liked.
Maybe suggest an "optimize" function to re-organize the existing index if such method doesn't exist yet?
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That's one area where Sphinx excels, it can query any number of indexes, even on remote hosts with no performance penalty (other than the obvious aggregate index sizes). Most of the work setting up Sphinx was making sure all the charsets worked out properly (unicode and such) and setting up automatic updating / index rotation. The actual PHP code was quite simple since they provide a really good PHP API.
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On December 23 2009 16:07 R1CH wrote:
Once a post is indexed, it's indexed. If a post is edited after the search engine has indexed it, any changes in the edit will not be searchable. Get your post right first time!
none of my posts are going to be searchable now
Thanks for the fix r1ch.
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United States11390 Posts
On December 23 2009 17:44 Ilikestarcraft wrote:Show nested quote +On December 23 2009 16:07 R1CH wrote:
Once a post is indexed, it's indexed. If a post is edited after the search engine has indexed it, any changes in the edit will not be searchable. Get your post right first time!
none of my posts are going to be searchable now
-_________-
Anyways, fuck yes being able to search for 3 letter words now. Thanks R1ch. <33
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On December 23 2009 16:23 R1CH wrote:
I really don't think it's as big an issue as you think, most edits are made within a few minutes of a post being posted and there's a low chance it would get indexed in that timeframe.
That's a really good point. Sounds good to me.
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...I don't understand a single technical term in this thread. R1CH, you seem really smart. I'd love to be your Sphinx and suck the RAM out of your delta index 
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R1CH why has SA not already done this
explain it to me in terms a dumb person would understand
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Is the non updated index going to be a problem on live report topics where the OP gets edited many times over the course of hours of gameplay?
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Oh so sweet.
The only thing is really disliked on TL was the search engine. Good job.
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Some steps forward, some back.
I think the steps forward are bigger, but some of those back steps could be problematic.(editing for some threads)
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Thanks R1CH and everyone who worked on this!
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is awesome32271 Posts
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Awesome work, even though the first two disadvantages kinda suck...
I'm glad to see restrictions go.
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Very nice R1CH... glad to see continuous improvements are always being made.
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Thanks, I really do appreciate the faster loads, and esp. when TSL is active, not being able to search was a pain. I am one of those search your own name people and am hoping that you find a good solution to that since I am too lazy to go back and look lots of times.
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Can someone explain how editing is such a big deal? The content of most edits is very minor, if it's an entirely new post, why not just make a new post?
On December 23 2009 18:25 H wrote:
R1CH why has SA not already done this
explain it to me in terms a dumb person would understand
They did, it just took two years to implement for some reason.
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Canada9720 Posts
any thread with substantial OP edits is probably stickied or prominent enough to find without text searching, so yeah, it's probably not a big deal
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CTStalker, the idea of a search function is to eliminate the need to look through a bunch of sticky posts and other posts of certain kind.
--
The whole edit issue isn't that big of a deal, if full indexing happens at some interval (every week, month or half-year). Claiming a need to search in the edits of posts made within the last week (or month or so) is ridiculous.
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GrandInquisitor
New York City13113 Posts
On December 23 2009 23:27 R1CH wrote:
Can someone explain how editing is such a big deal? The content of most edits is very minor, if it's an entirely new post, why not just make a new post?
Any topic with a static OP (e.g., R&S topics, tournament topics, live report topics, "vault"-type topics) is often updated repeatedly. I agree that these topics are usually pretty easy to find on their own, but it seems inelegant.
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Canada9720 Posts
Badjas, you can still search those threads, and in all likelihood, you'd be searching for something like the thread title, or keywords that were in the original OP, not things like 'UPDATE'. unless some of you guys do search for 'UPDATE'? lolz
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Finally, Ive been searching a lot of things lately and some things take FOREVER to load... R1CH!!!! I love your icon, its by far teh pimpest one out of all of the ones on TL. If you update it to the wizard with the lightning I call dibs on this one!
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On December 23 2009 23:58 GrandInquisitor wrote:Show nested quote +On December 23 2009 23:27 R1CH wrote:
Can someone explain how editing is such a big deal? The content of most edits is very minor, if it's an entirely new post, why not just make a new post? Any topic with a static OP (e.g., R&S topics, tournament topics, live report topics, "vault"-type topics) is often updated repeatedly. I agree that these topics are usually pretty easy to find on their own, but it seems inelegant.
R&S and tournament posts are usually only updated with the results, the maps and players would still be in the OP and still be searchable so nothing is really lost. LR threads tend to move so fast that people make new posts rather than edits, and they are unlikely to edit a LR post after a few minutes I imagine. I just don't see the "doomsday scenario" where someone posts something and the entire content of the post changes after indexing.
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i don't see the index issue at all (although i never noticed the slowdown issue either so maybe i'm just b lind)
here's how i see it.. keep in mind (as i understand it) your posts aren't indexed immediately after you post.. so that if you post at time t, and the next indexing takes place at t+1, any edits you made in between those 2 (let's say it's 30 minutes) will be indexed as well
and it's fairly rare for a post to be updated significantly after its post date.. with the few exceptions already outlined.. but the exceptions are easy to find either way (tourney threads etc)
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I'm not a person that overuses search, so better speed and faster searches are great. The disadvantages are not minor though. We'll see, and thanks R1CH!
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Ok I love everything GREAT JOB /bow. But then I got to this part Updates are no longer real-time. Search is primarily used to help locate older posts; Sphinx does not support index updates so updates to the search index will happen on an hourly (depending on server load) basis. We are discussing alternatives for those of you who are search-happy with your own username.
Also The edit thing is kind of fucked up.
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Mystlord
United States10264 Posts
On December 24 2009 02:29 R1CH wrote:Show nested quote +On December 23 2009 23:58 GrandInquisitor wrote:On December 23 2009 23:27 R1CH wrote:
Can someone explain how editing is such a big deal? The content of most edits is very minor, if it's an entirely new post, why not just make a new post? Any topic with a static OP (e.g., R&S topics, tournament topics, live report topics, "vault"-type topics) is often updated repeatedly. I agree that these topics are usually pretty easy to find on their own, but it seems inelegant. R&S and tournament posts are usually only updated with the results, the maps and players would still be in the OP and still be searchable so nothing is really lost. LR threads tend to move so fast that people make new posts rather than edits, and they are unlikely to edit a LR post after a few minutes I imagine. I just don't see the "doomsday scenario" where someone posts something and the entire content of the post changes after indexing.
Well I brought up this example earlier, but you might have missed it, so here it is again:
The edit thing might be a problem because we'd lose a lot of new material (I'm thinking updates to topics like Stylish FPVODs and Day[9] podcasts).
A few more examples that I could think of are Guides in the Strategy section that might be reliant on editing the opening post. For example, the Walling Guides (both Terran and Protoss), updates to any strategy guides (There are a lot of updates spread out over a long time for some of them), Updates to Day[9] Daily OPs (if someone wanted to search up Flash vs Stork and it wasn't indexed...), also the "Guidelines" topics like the 10 Commandments and the SC2 forum guidelines, etc etc... I think it's a rather big problem, but it'll be manageable.
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16957 Posts
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You guys are overreacting to the index update problem. As rich already said, the incremental indexing runs approximately once every hour, and since most people make edits directly after their posts, it's extremely unlikely that your edits will not be included.
With bigger problems proposed by Mystlord, it could be resolved by occasional re-construction of the indices.
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YAY! Finally a better search engine. Thanks TL!
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new search isn't letting me search just a username from the options without an actual search query.
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The username is a filter on the returned result set, whatever functionality it provide before if you left the query empty was a nasty hack.
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New search is now live, testing shows a huge improvement.
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Korea (South)11573 Posts
now this is fucking awesome!
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You the man rich thanks for puting the work in!
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United States47024 Posts
On December 23 2009 18:33 NovaTheFeared wrote:
Is the non updated index going to be a problem on live report topics where the OP gets edited many times over the course of hours of gameplay?
Most LR thread edits don't actually add new text (e.g. the match list is already up the first time the thread is posted, and the results simply boldface the winner). The ones that do probably don't add new words.
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GrandInquisitor
New York City13113 Posts
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Sounds like a nice enough deal really. good work^^
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I've always just used the "Google TL.net" feature instead of the default search, but it's cool that we have a new one.
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On December 24 2009 05:57 R1CH wrote:
The username is a filter on the returned result set, whatever functionality it provide before if you left the query empty was a nasty hack.
You're nothing but trouble, mister!
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On December 24 2009 09:51 TheYango wrote:Show nested quote +On December 23 2009 18:33 NovaTheFeared wrote:
Is the non updated index going to be a problem on live report topics where the OP gets edited many times over the course of hours of gameplay? Most LR thread edits don't actually add new text (e.g. the match list is already up the first time the thread is posted, and the results simply boldface the winner). The ones that do probably don't add new words.
what about recommended games? (in the LR thread)
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Mystlord
United States10264 Posts
On December 24 2009 11:18 Trezeguet23 wrote:Show nested quote +On December 24 2009 09:51 TheYango wrote:On December 23 2009 18:33 NovaTheFeared wrote:
Is the non updated index going to be a problem on live report topics where the OP gets edited many times over the course of hours of gameplay? Most LR thread edits don't actually add new text (e.g. the match list is already up the first time the thread is posted, and the results simply boldface the winner). The ones that do probably don't add new words. what about recommended games? (in the LR thread)
Why would you want to search for them?
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On December 24 2009 11:46 Mystlord wrote:Show nested quote +On December 24 2009 11:18 Trezeguet23 wrote:On December 24 2009 09:51 TheYango wrote:On December 23 2009 18:33 NovaTheFeared wrote:
Is the non updated index going to be a problem on live report topics where the OP gets edited many times over the course of hours of gameplay? Most LR thread edits don't actually add new text (e.g. the match list is already up the first time the thread is posted, and the results simply boldface the winner). The ones that do probably don't add new words. what about recommended games? (in the LR thread) Why would you want to search for them?
I guess I misunderstood something, but your question snapped me back into line. Thanks.
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Ok I searched for pizza, but the one I got has salami on it instead of pepperoni... =|
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Nice, as a developer myself I also take a interest in things like this. Thanks for sharing.
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now to search for every ver post on tl^^
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HonestTea
5007 Posts
Thank you R1CH - you really make this place cozy and comfy
[edit] haha of course I must have been drunk.
R1CH of course, is the man.
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Fixed quotes not working, searching for a "complete phrase" now works properly. Note that this only works if the entire query is enclosed by quotes for now.
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I cant even begin to fathom what you do.
Im sure its for the best, and thank you very much. <3
edit: I LOVE that feature about google, that I can look for "this exact sentence".. tyty
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WOW, that's soooo awesome. Thank you, thank you, thank you. New search is so good. Yet another reason to love TL
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Added search suggestions to hopefully catch typos, there is a good chance they may generate some stupid results though .
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Temporarily down for a Sphinx upgrade.
EDIT: Done
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The search results are sorted by the last message timestamp of the thread the result appears in. Could you make it an option to sort the results by the timestamp of the found message itself? This of course only applies when a search is done on message content rather than titles only. Though for a title only search, I could imagine someone would want to sort results by thread creation time, rather than last message time. On occasion.
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finally i can search for "pz" if I want to search for 2v2 strategies
Thanks... and the search results come soooo much faster.
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Omfg awesome! I always had trouble with words that were considered too short. Great job guys!
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51397 Posts
Is it possible you can add a date function?
For example, I want to find the first use of the word 'bonjwa'. Unfortunately since there are so many posts of the word, it only shows the first 1000 which were all in 2009.
I thus want to search between 2002 and 2007 for example. Do you understand this or am I just being silly.
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United States4796 Posts
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...Lol...several parts reminded me of that one mafia game! How that one list got posted as an edit, dude searched his own name and found it...lol.
Anyway, cool R1CH.
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Yeah this is really annoying, like if I want to search Day[9]'s posts including 'zvp' I only get the ones from his Day[9] daily thread.
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On December 30 2009 02:39 Espers wrote:Yeah this is really annoying, like if I want to search Day[9]'s posts including 'zvp' I only get the ones from his Day[9] daily thread.
This should be working now.
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finally!!!! this is just uber awesome.. ive been longing for a better search function on TL for years litterally!
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On December 30 2009 03:33 R1CH wrote:Show nested quote +On December 30 2009 02:39 Espers wrote:Yeah this is really annoying, like if I want to search Day[9]'s posts including 'zvp' I only get the ones from his Day[9] daily thread. This should be working now.
It didn't work for me, I just tried searching for a user's name in the username search box, but nothing came up.
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Oh I didn't read properly and I didn't search for any words in the query box. I was just looking for all the topics that the user ever made, so I left the top blank and just filled in the box for username, which worked for the previous search function but doesn't seem to be an option anymore.
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5386 Posts
The one-time indexing is understandable but the drawbacks can be curbed pretty easily. You should keep the mysql search active, but only available as a "secondary" option once a user searched with no satisfaction. Give us the option to "run using real-time search (slower)" on the bottom of the search results page.
Hype threads and other constantly OP-edited threads will probably be affected the most by the one-time indexing.
Cool that you got this setup though. I can only imagine the type of ram a fulltext search on TL would suck up..
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United States24629 Posts
Do quotation marks serve any purpose? According to my tests they don't restrict how the search narrows results at all...
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On January 02 2010 07:05 micronesia wrote:
Do quotation marks serve any purpose? According to my tests they don't restrict how the search narrows results at all...
The currently only work if the entire search query is surrounded, individual sub-phrases are not implemented yet.
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On January 02 2010 06:52 pheer wrote:
You should keep the mysql search active
Nope, MySQL search locks the DB. It's gone and not coming back, indexes are already dropped which saved almost a gig, allowing the other more-useful indexes to stay in RAM. I really doubt people need to search to be able to find a LR thread.
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United States24629 Posts
Oh you are right the quotes do work. However, the ' seems to throw it off. For example, I searched for "I'm a dragoon" and it returned many bad things... but it worked when I searched for "I am a dragoon" and also transposed dragoon to goon for me in one instance <3
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Sounds good. I'm still greatly missing the possibility of simply viewing all posts of a specific user. You are forced to put in keywords whenever you search for a specific users.
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There's quite a few things at work there to make that happen, most notably, stopwords.
"While stopwords are not indexed, they still do affect the keyword positions. For instance, assume that "the" is a stopword, that document 1 contains the line "in office", and that document 2 contains "in the office". Searching for "in office" as for exact phrase will only return the first document, as expected, even though "the" in the second one is stopped.
Stopwords currently include common terms like I, a, the.
Thus, searching for "I'm a dragoon" will actually search for "m * dragoon" while "I am a dragoon" will search for "* am * dragoon". Both searches will still have goon / dragoon mapping applied.
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United States24629 Posts
I don't suppose there's any way to make a strict quote where it searches for only hits that match your quote exactly?
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No, since only words are indexed, not phrases. Any characters that aren't part of the search character set (eg ') are treated as word breaks. The main problem is that "I'm" is read as "m" by the indexer, I'll see about adding a wordform for it.
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A suggestion is to use table partitioning instead/on top of indexing. It's a much better scaling out strategy as you can limit load on any one mysql instance. You get the benefit of real time querying and without needing to lose any recent updates. Con is it take a little bit of work to setup.
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And more hardware than we currently have.
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5386 Posts
I never experienced any site slowness or lockups myself, ever. TL has always been the fastest loading site for me after google. But if this new search is stopping a lot of DB killing it's a great addition, nice job.
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By normal forum logic, the following should return all posts I ever made.
It doesn't. R1CH, any chance that you can avoid having to type any search words when you have filled out the username field?
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what is a "beeboo beeboo"
and @asjo/r1ch... Try letting the default search push "*" and all your wildest dreams may come true.
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On January 03 2010 02:47 love1another wrote:
what is a "beeboo beeboo"
and @asjo/r1ch... Try letting the default search push "*" and all your wildest dreams may come true.
No, wildcards do not work, at least not in place of a search word. Have tried that.
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United States24629 Posts
On January 02 2010 21:12 Asjo wrote:By normal forum logic, the following should return all posts I ever made. It doesn't. R1CH, any chance that you can avoid having to type any search words when you have filled out the username field?
Well you can always find your posts by using the 'posts' button... just can't do it for other users. You used to be able to search for all threads STARTED by you by doing a search similar to the one you showed above. I think you chose 'title' instead of 'title and content'. Also, if you did a content search it would bring up a list of all matching usernames that Sonuvbob implemented. I think that got removed by R1ch's updated due to the new software though.
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micronesia, I know that. When I realised after posting that someone might confuse these things, I thought in retrespect that it would have been better to used another user as an example. Alas, it wasn't so
Regardless, the point is that I want to be able to find all posts of any user, which I suspect is something the search-feature is often used for on forums (with a link to all posts directly in the user profiles in some cases). When I see kolll and Strelok posting on these forums, I'm curious to see what they have written earlier. If you want to understand a specific user better, it's really helpful to look through their previous posts. And if someone is doing a lot of differing things in different forums that you find intersting, it would be an easy way to catch up. I'm really quite the stalker-type, so I have enjoyed how recent websites (for instance schroet.com or facebook.com, for instance) have started to track anything a user does, so that this can easily be tracked :p
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United States24629 Posts
On January 03 2010 06:16 Asjo wrote:micronesia, I know that. When I realised after posting that someone might confuse these things, I thought in retrespect that it would have been better to used another user as an example. Alas, it wasn't so Regardless, the point is that I want to be able to find all posts of any user, which I suspect is something the search-feature is often used for on forums (with a link to all posts directly in the user profiles in some cases). When I see kolll and Strelok posting on these forums, I'm curious to see what they have written earlier. If you want to understand a specific user better, it's really helpful to look through their previous posts. And if someone is doing a lot of differing things in different forums that you find intersting, it would be an easy way to catch up. I'm really quite the stalker-type, so I have enjoyed how recent websites (for instance schroet.com or facebook.com, for instance) have started to track anything a user does, so that this can easily be tracked :p
Post histories have been requested for years... don't think they are about to happen :p
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On January 03 2010 06:34 micronesia wrote:Show nested quote +On January 03 2010 06:16 Asjo wrote:micronesia, I know that. When I realised after posting that someone might confuse these things, I thought in retrespect that it would have been better to used another user as an example. Alas, it wasn't so Regardless, the point is that I want to be able to find all posts of any user, which I suspect is something the search-feature is often used for on forums (with a link to all posts directly in the user profiles in some cases). When I see kolll and Strelok posting on these forums, I'm curious to see what they have written earlier. If you want to understand a specific user better, it's really helpful to look through their previous posts. And if someone is doing a lot of differing things in different forums that you find intersting, it would be an easy way to catch up. I'm really quite the stalker-type, so I have enjoyed how recent websites (for instance schroet.com or facebook.com, for instance) have started to track anything a user does, so that this can easily be tracked :p Post histories have been requested for years... don't think they are about to happen :p
I had the impression earlier that the feature had been left out to limit the bandwidth usage of the search function. I don't remember what made me think that there would be no reason not to implement it now, but I had that thought after another attempt of desperately trying to get the search function obey my will; I posted about this is the search engine thread, without any reply. So, the way I see, it must simply be a matter of getting R1CH to see my reasonable request ... Or maybe that have such distrust in users as to think that it will only help personal vendettas escalate with people following each other around.
At the very least there should be an error message saying that you have put in a search word, so that us stalkers don't waste our time trying :o
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that's actually a good function, a few days ago someone asked me to link them a few pics with nada so I thought I'd try to search for nevergg's photoposts with the username search. didnt work but I found the thread after a while anyway. it's just easier if we can have that function.
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For some reason the C-pop discussion thread doesn't show up with a title search. C-pop doesn't work whereas J-pop works for that discussion thread. The c-pop thread comes up if you search title+content but that's not default and it also isn't the top result.
I'm not sure how hyphenated word searching works but it would be nice if c-pop and cpop, kpop and k-pop, and j-pop and jpop returned corresponding results. It's also strange that kpop isn't hypenated like the other two, but maybe that's a standard.
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konadora
Singapore66145 Posts
Small bump, how do you find posts/threads made by a specific user? Last time you could leave the search blank and just type in the user in the username part, but now it doesn't work.
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Aotearoa39261 Posts
D: first time in a while that the 1000 post limitation has pissed me off. Can't get into the proleague 2006 good stuff
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On March 28 2010 11:29 konadora wrote:
Small bump, how do you find posts/threads made by a specific user? Last time you could leave the search blank and just type in the user in the username part, but now it doesn't work.
Makes seeing what people got banned for so much harder
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By popular demand, you can now find posts by specific users. Leave the query blank and enter the username, or open someones forum profile and click the link on their posts.
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On May 09 2010 15:49 R1CH wrote:
By popular demand, you can now find posts by specific users. Leave the query blank and enter the username, or open someones forum profile and click the link on their posts.
thanks rich!
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On May 09 2010 15:49 R1CH wrote:
By popular demand, you can now find posts by specific users. Leave the query blank and enter the username, or open someones forum profile and click the link on their posts.
you just opened the floodgates for all the TL.net post stalkers to get in...
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On May 10 2010 04:02 Shizuru~ wrote:Show nested quote +On May 09 2010 15:49 R1CH wrote:
By popular demand, you can now find posts by specific users. Leave the query blank and enter the username, or open someones forum profile and click the link on their posts. you just opened the floodgates for all the TL.net post stalkers to get in...
I have to agree. I was under the impression that keeping people's posting history private for regular members was a conscious decision. However, it is a really cool feature in combination with the ban list }-)
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I just noticed this! I was suspecting it when I saw the '#' being added for easier linking to specifc posts. Thanks, R1CH, and yay stalkers! :D ... Us curious people need something to do
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Could the search function be modified to sort by replies, views or in alphabetical order?
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Hi there -- could we please be able to specify a time range (or if not that, then maybe have the ability to exclude recent posts... or maybe even be able to search by the year) for when we want to search for something?
Because I like to look back and browse TL as it used to be... but its really hard to find threads that I remember from years ago. I only vaguely remember the things discussed and whenever I search for those things, I get random unrelated things from the past 2 years and it cuts off on page 5 or so where the oldest post was like 2 years ago.
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What is this wizardry?
I'm glad the search works nicer. Just tested it now, it works just fine. Nothing sticks out, which is a good thing, afaik. Even so, maybe an extension on the maximum results would be nice for people who want really old stuff, and don't remember the ?topic_id
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On June 14 2011 03:27 GigaFlop wrote:
What is this wizardry?
I'm glad the search works nicer. Just tested it now, it works just fine. Nothing sticks out, which is a good thing, afaik. Even so, maybe an extension on the maximum results would be nice for people who want really old stuff, and don't remember the ?topic_id
You realize that the OP was posted in 2009 right?
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On June 14 2011 03:42 Kazragore wrote:Show nested quote +On June 14 2011 03:27 GigaFlop wrote:
What is this wizardry?
I'm glad the search works nicer. Just tested it now, it works just fine. Nothing sticks out, which is a good thing, afaik. Even so, maybe an extension on the maximum results would be nice for people who want really old stuff, and don't remember the ?topic_id You realize that the OP was posted in 2009 right?
Lol, bit rosey cheeked arent we?
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nice bump! wrong thread :x
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Busy busy busy with the changes, sweet
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On November 04 2011 05:10 Battleaxe wrote:
Busy busy busy with the changes, sweet
thread is from 2 years ago, nothing new here.
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if it's wrong thread why is it marked as give feed back or ask??
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If you don't understand why a shitty strategy post doesn't belong in a two-year-old thread about the introduction of a search function, I suggest you take a break from TeamLiquid and think about it until it becomes clear to you.
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Sigh, got me all excited for nothing
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On November 04 2011 05:17 elmizzt wrote:Sigh, got me all excited for nothing
To be honest, so did i. ^_^
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EPT
![[image loading]](/staff/R1CH/tlweekRPS.png)
![[image loading]](http://img15.imageshack.us/img15/2821/tlsearch.jpg)
