New Mechanism Implimented for TalkBass Forum Search

**paul** · #1 09-16-2006, 10:42 PM

While moving to the new server, I changed the way that VBulletin searches our forums. I'll get into the tech stuff later. What this means for you is, the default vbulletin search is going to be more "loose" than it was. It simply searches for ANY of the keywords you enter, and that's it (no phrase matches, etc). Also you cannot search for terms 3 characters or less.

Now, to get around this, use the in-house Google Search that we've implimented. This google search is incredibly powerful. You can use any boolean operators (any tricks you use on Google will work on this, like "AND", "OR", "+", "-", "whole phrase matches", etc). To use the google search for the TalkBass forums, just pull down the search menu, or go to the advanced search page - in either spot you'll find a field for the google search of TalkBass.

The results of this Google search will most likely be a text archive page. Don't worry - you can click to the "live" version of the thread by simply clicking the "Full version" link atop any archive page. [Read More]

**paul** · #2 09-16-2006, 10:43 PM

The tech reasons behind this: The default VBulletin search, which we had been using, uses a massive index table in the database, which indexes every single instance of every single word in the forums, to make that word searchable. Our search index table was over 63 million records long! To restore that kind of data on a server move, or to try to back up that kind of data daily is incredibly difficult, and it's not a long-term solution for TalkBass.

To get around this, we're now using MySQL's "Fulltext" search ability. Specifically, we are now using "Fulltext Natural" search. This is a loose word search. "Fulltext Boolean" is about as powerful as Google's search - but to use it, we would have to purchase another dedicated server, and use it to handle searches exclusively. That's out of my budget right now... At some point we can look into this, but for now, I think the Google search does a might fine job... and puts no load on TalkBass