Mahalo

The tech and “Web 2.0” section of the blogosphere is all a-twitter over the alpha launch of the new “people-powered” search engine, Mahalo, by Jason Calacanis (of Weblogs, Inc. and Netscape-relaunch fame). I’ve been checking it out a bit, and have some comments… There’s definitely no mystery under the hood, technology-wise, here: it’s simply a… Continue reading Mahalo

BendSearch

Check this out: BendSearch.com. Alpine, the company I used to work for, has finally resurrected it and updated it. Good for them. I was responsible for a lot of the work that went into that site back in the day (this would be in 2000-2001). Oh, I’m not bragging; that was, of course, early in… Continue reading BendSearch

Search Patch

While waiting to find out if my hosting provider will change the minimum fulltext word length for MySQL, here’s what I’ve done in the meantime to deal with viable three-character search terms. First, I split the search string into the component words (an array). I subtract any stopwords (I’ve got a big list) and for… Continue reading Search Patch

Searching and Minimum Word Length

Mike Boone, in the comments section of yesterday’s entry on searching (“Updated Search“), correctly points out that searching my site for a word that is less than four characters in length (like “php” or “cow”) does not work—no results are returned. Obviously, since I write about PHP on occasion, this is untenable. The problem is… Continue reading Searching and Minimum Word Length

Updated Search

I’ve been vastly updating the search functionality on my site. I’m still using MySQL‘s built-in FULLTEXT indexing to perform searches, but I’ve made the results page look a lot more (okay, almost exactly like) Google‘s. The main differences are that I’m not paginating search results (yet)—all searches limit to 10 results—and that I’m showing a… Continue reading Updated Search

Quick linking

Here’s something interesting: my blog entry on Bend WinterFest is now the number 4 result on Google when searching for “Bend winterfest“—less than two weeks after I posted it. Damn, that’s fast.

Search Snafu

This article on Gadgetopia links to my content management post I made yesterday (er, today?) and brings up a drawback to my system that I forgot to include: searching. Within the relational database world, you can do precise, structured queries against specific fields in your tables. In a properly normalized database, this is all-powerful. However,… Continue reading Search Snafu