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Subject: 
Re: News search function reactivated (was: News search function temporarily disabled)
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.admin.general, lugnet.off-topic.geek
Date: 
Wed, 3 Jan 2001 06:16:20 GMT
Viewed: 
20 times
  
In lugnet.admin.general, Todd Lehman writes:
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.

Wow!  So you have terms for the ampersand options in a URL?  My standpoint
on this would be to put everything in a form and kill 2 birds with 1 stone -
not having to think of how to name URL terms (unless you enjoy doing that)
and having the search more user-friendly (not everyone will remember the
options or find it easy to edit the URL).

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?

No, I meant having the option to pick between what I want the results to be
sorting on.  Dejanews has a great power search:

http://www.deja.com/home_ps.shtml

which includes the option to sort by relevance, subject, forum, author and
date.  That's how I would like to see the sort options here.  But knowing
that you most likely don't have the resources that dejanews has and how
flawlessly Lugnet runs on the current setup, I'm satisfied with editing the
URL for now :-)

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.  :-)

It could be done.  Include another version of jump.cgi into the 5 more, 10
more... on the search results page and log the number of results returned,
the IP address and the query subject.  Then run an average, min, max query
grouped by all 3 fields.  Sounds complicated, depends on how badly you want
to see the results.  I wouldn't want to go through the process of
implementing that but would really like to see the results :-)



Message has 1 Reply:
  Re: News search function reactivated (was: News search function temporarily disabled)
 
(...) Ya, exactly -- first name the URL components carefully and then put a user- friendly level on top of it. Best of both worlds. (...) Ah, I see. Yeah, that could be helpful in certain cases, if you're scouring tons of results! I've needed to (...) (24 years ago, 3-Jan-01, to lugnet.admin.general, lugnet.off-topic.geek)

Message is in Reply To:
  Re: News search function reactivated (was: News search function temporarily disabled)
 
(...) 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 (...) (24 years ago, 3-Jan-01, to lugnet.admin.general, lugnet.off-topic.geek)

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