07-Jul-2011: BLF search engine fixed

Hi everyone,

I've been having some minor problems with the site during the past few months that I just now detected. It's fixed now.

For those who don't really care about the details: The search engine( s ) should work a lot better now.

For the techies: The Drupal search indexer was trying to index a non-existent node, which caused the indexer to fail and also hang the cron process. So we had an out of date search index, leading to poor search results on the 2nd stage Drupal search engine. And our sitemap.xml also wasn't current, because the cron process was hanging and never reached the stage where it should update the sitemap and submit it to Google. This probably affected our Google search results and the local Google Custom Search Engine (1st stage search) as well.

For everybody: You might not have noticed, but we actually have two search engines here on BLF. The one toward the top left runs a Google search on BLF content. It features the typical Google omniscient search logic and generally produces pretty relevant results. It also doesn't put any load on our server. But at the top of the Google search results page, there is another search box, which triggers BLF's own onboard search engine. So if you don't find what you're looking for with the Google search, you can always try the second stage search engine, which is now fixed.

Cheers, thanks to everyone for being with us at BLF!

This is very cool, it is going to save me lots of time looking for reference articles.Thanks for effort and making this sight that much better.

IDK if this is still relevant (2008) but appears interesting to people who care about such things:

http://acquia.com/blog/drupals-search-compared-google-and-yahoo

Yep, it's still relevant. Thanks for the link.

I currently have the four scoring factors equally weighted, and it does a pretty good job of it. I mainly prefer Google as the first stage search so that if a malicious user tries to DOS attack via the search mechanism, they'll hit Google and not BLF. Anonymous users have to complete a CAPTCHA before they can use the Drupal search engine, but not to use Google search.

thank you for your hard work behind the scenes .

someday you can sell this forum and buy a small piece of land .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x56MtVXDbJ8

Based on that one minute clip, I call dibs on the guest house! :bigsmile: