Subject:
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Re: News search function reactivated (was: News search function temporarily disabled)
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.admin.general, lugnet.off-topic.geek
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Date:
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Wed, 3 Jan 2001 05:16:07 GMT
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Viewed:
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19152 times
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In lugnet.admin.general, Dan Jezek writes:
> > [...]
> > example, to limit posts to the last 10 days, use
> >
> > &qs=864000
>
> It works great! ... but the &qs doesn't carry over to the next page of
> results. So if I want to see more pages, I have to edit the querystring on
> each page.
oops, doy! I didn't put in the propagation of that URL term. I don't consider
it 100% "documented" yet (it's still subject to change without notice), but I
still shouldn't have missed that. Thanks. I'll fix that.
The reason it's subject to change is partially because the letter 's' in 'qs'
is named after the word (or greek letter, rather) 'sigma' -- sigma being 1
standard deviation in the bell curve function f(x) = exp(-x^2/2) -- and that
formula isn't being used anymore in the searches, and partially because 'qs'
might better someday be used for "query subject." Anyway, it's still not 100%
in stone. But it'll work until it breaks.
> Since you already have the inner workings of this in place, it
> would be really easy to just add a textbox named "qs" and add the &qs= to
> the bottom "5 more, 10 more"... links. With a little more effort, you could
> include radio buttons to have the user select how many days, months or years
> they want to go back and have your search engine convert it to milliseconds
> depending on what the user selects.
Yup, that's the idea!!! Say, where is that old article about sigma and
advanced options...ah! so easy to find now! :-)
http://news.lugnet.com/?q=url+query+qs+qt+sigma+%3C//1.5
(See topmost result and related thread for more background.)
> > It's actually in the nature of search engines to generate thousands of
> > results.
>
> If given thousands of results, most search engines have some advanced
> options like sorting.
Well, they -are- sorted. They're always sorted -- always highest probability
of relevance first, lowest last. Usually, the metric for relevance is a
combination of non-temporal factors such as word frequencies, word proximities,
and word orderings. I don't know of any search engine that doesn't sort (on
some criteria) the matches it finds. But anyway, I think you meant sorting
by time?
I wonder if a little link at the top to re-deploy the search taking recentness
into account (or conversely, turning it off if it's on) would be useful?
> > What's more important is the first page returned -- i.e., the ranking.
> > Typically one doesn't dig down past the first few, so you rarely
> > actually go visit all the thousands.
>
> I'd be interested in seeing some statistics on how far the average user goes
> when given back let's say 10, 100 and 1,000 pages of results. It would help
> in the design of an effective search engine.
Me too. I'd expect a f(x)=1/x type of curve, but it would be fun to see actual
numbers. :-)
--Todd
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