Geek Speak — HabitableZone

Geek Speak » in reply to I vote to make searches available...

See why I hesitate?
Robert — (archived)

Everybody wants a search facility, but everybody has strong and different opinions about how to do it. Hell, I'm divided on the question--a private search would make me feel slightly more secure, but OTOH I enjoy the way the Zone has influence beyond its borders, and public search would maintain that influence. Should the Zone be public, or pull up the drawbridge? Search is just part of that question.

A fully public search would be relatively easy, because all I'd have to do is create an XML file for the site root listing URLs to spider, and then the search engines would do all the heavy lifting. A private search, on the other hand, would be a lot of work, requiring me to get into code that's been stable for five years (and which kind of baffles me, when I look at it today; five years is a long time). Then there's my relative unfamiliarity with text searching in a database. I don't think it's enough to just use SQL's '%' wildcards. I hear MySQL has a more flexible text searching facility, but then the one and only time I tried to install MySQL, it was a disaster. All in all, I have to say that the technical side of a search system, unusually for a technophile like me, doesn't give me a warm and fuzzy feeling.

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