Technical Problem Search Engine Fail

Bob Loblaw

Bob Loblaw

Bluelight Crew
Joined
Mar 1, 2008
Messages
18,174
Location
yolimo
I just tried searching for tma* in "titles only" and I came up with two threads (a trip report & a movie). However, using Google to search BL comes up with many more. Anyone else getting this error or knows why I am?



P.S. I swear to drunk I'm not god this time.
 
Cuz google is returning anything with tma in it including titles and content and even code in the page. Also the number you see from google that tells you how many pages are returned is not accurate. It's an approximate number.
 
^ I am getting the same results (2 results using the BL search but a bunch more when using the google search). Even when typing in "TMA-6" which is a thread title that comes up with the google search results it doesn't come up in the advanced search on the right, or even the regular search bar on the right.
 
Well fuck I was looking at this for you and got tired of the "server busy" message.

So, I'll tell you this. Google doesn't always see dashes as literal hyphen characters. It sees it as spaces sometimes, so the 991 results are pulling in the TMA-<something> phrase because it's picking up TMA as a separate word from the appended data after the hyphen.

Google is contextual, so it will try to "guess" what you want by the content within, and it is very good at working through code errors or corrupted data. It's possible that the BL search is much more static, unforgiving of errors, and literal. Actually, I'm sure it is. Where Google will try to pick up "TMA" and its variants, vBulletin will only pick up TMA and nothing else, including if there is any data corruption or extra characters included. For instance, if there is a space in the title, it might miss it (guessing here).

I know it's hard for people to understand, but these little search engines are very specific where Google has an entire team of people who create synonyms to words so it can understand the context of the phrase you're typing in.

I was gonna try to look, but server busy is annoying me.
 
Maybe I'm misreading you, but I'm typing in "TMA*" to find any phrase beginning with TMA. So that way any threads titled, for example, TMA6 Overdose, TMA-2 Help, and TMA 4 Synth Recipes, should pop up. BL only returns those two threads, whereas Google will return all threads with TMA in the title (amongst other things, I presume).
Thanks for the help though :).
 
Well, you have me at one point: does BL recognize the asterisk? You got me there if it does. I didn't think it did.
 
Ah, yeah, its search can handle boolean terms and the asterisk and such. Quite useful for finding, uh, tasteful photos people have posted ;).
 
Oh man you got me. I didn't know they supported wildcard characters. I guess since Tommyboy posted that it's being looked into. Hey I tried! lol
 
Seems like the minimum word length that the search engine is to index is set to 4. So when you search "tma*", it looks for all words of 4+ length that start as "tma" in the DB. And I get the impression that it is alphabet characters only. "tmaa" would be found, but not "tma1".

Google can afford to do deeper searches, so it will find everything.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top