The search feature is not down. It works as expected. Search for any term and you will see that results are being returned (search for 'hair' for instance).
Due to the size of our forums (approaching 4M posts) we can no longer rely on the built in search of the forum as it locks the whole database rendering the forum unusable. We have used an external search engine which indexes the board every 5 minutes. The external search engine allows for extremely fast retrieval of results. It does however has some limitations which we are working to overcome.
The limitations list is as follows (I had mentioned in the announcement a couple of them).
1. You cannot filter by number of replies
2. Sorting by title/number of replies/views/thread start date/username/forum isn't possible. The external search engine cannot perform this due to insufficient data stored in it.
3. Searches by userid/forumid WITHOUT a key word are not possible. So searching only for posts made by 'dimopoulos' will not work (hence the error message you see on the screen). If you provide 'dimopoulos' and search for 'hair' you will get results back.
4. Search Results out of order because the time stamps are too old. The external search engine doesn't query MySQL to get the latest time stamps. So if your thread had its last reply 3 days ago, was indexed by the search engine 2 days ago and now today got a new reply, the search engine will still assume its last reply was 3 days ago. In the search results, it will put waaay back instead being at the top. There is no easy fix for this, and certainly no fast one, because this is just what makes the external search engine so fast. We're sacrificing a bit of "up-to-date-ness" to gain speed.
Our options are as follows:
- Start using vBulletin's internal search engine which inevitably will lock down the forum and render it useless every day (people search a lot
)
- Disable the search engine altogether (not an option really)
- Use the external search engine to allow fast searches at the cost of limits in functionality.
Similar sized boards have the same problems (we are not the only ones).
We are working on two possible solutions. One is to try and enhance the external search engine to allow for missing functionality. This is really difficult since most searches i.e. the Today's posts, posts by soandso, etc. are not full text searches, rather combinations of numerous factors. If we take into account all those factors then the search speed will be significantly reduced, bringing us to the same problem as before.
We have however enabled Google to index the whole site. Google takes a long time to index a site as big as ours so it will be a slow process but it will provide more accurate results. Again it won't provide posts by 'soandso' but you can type the username as a parameter in the query. (this is the Google search box top right).
In short we cannot act right now to rectify these limitations. We need to work a bit more to ensure that whatever is done we do not sacrifice performance or the rest of the board for that matter.
Keep an eye on the announcements for the progress in that area.
Thank you all for your understanding.
erplexed