How does the Fluther Search engine work?
Asked by
syz (
35938
)
June 6th, 2008
I can never really figure out what parameters the search funcition is using – the list and order often seems rather random. (I apologize if this has been asked before – I couldn’t find it with “search”) Of course, I’m completely technologically inept, so it may be obvious and I’m just dense.
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4 Answers
it uses what people say in it, it uses titles, and it uses “topics”
simple enough for ya? lol
the order is chronological i believe.
Before last week, it would find searched words in subjects, descriptions, and tags based on scarcity and frequency—which worked fairly well for single word queries but was crappy because there was no phrase-based searching.
We scrapped that last week for a very simple exact phrase search which isn’t weighted—so on 90% of the queries (like “global warming”) it works much better, unless you type in queries like “iphone jailbreak apple”, where it won’t find anything.
Both strategies will be scrapped when we revisit search again.
Thanks, andrew. I was confused when a single word search would bring up a list that included items that had that word in the body of the answer and items that actually had the search word in the question were further down the list.
Not to be a smart ass but um Andrew typing “iphone jailbreak apple” actually yields one result. So it looks like the fluther search egine is pretty good eh? ;)
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