Posts tagged as:

search

Drupal Search Funkiness

June 7, 2006 · 9 comments

in Uncategorized

I've been noticing that the search feature of this Drupal blog has been acting up for awhile – searching for "drupal" turns up only 4 items, but I've written many many posts mentioning Drupal. I didn't think it was a big deal, but I've actually been getting emails and IMs asking me wtf wrt searching.

So, I dug a bit deeper. Turns out, Drupal is refusing to index my content when cron.php is called. It's called every hour, but the /admin/settings/search status indicator is stuck at:

Drupal Search Index Not Updating: Taken on 2006/06/07, showing the search index not updating, even though cron.php is called every hour (and I even manually triggered it several times) and the number of items to process is turned down to 10.Drupal Search Index Not Updating: Taken on 2006/06/07, showing the search index not updating, even though cron.php is called every hour (and I even manually triggered it several times) and the number of items to process is turned down to 10.

Some poking around on the Drupal site didn't turn up anything useful. I'll keep poking around to hopefully find out wtf is going on with searching. It's a puzzler…

Update: Temporarily fixed. Something's definitely borked. It's only updating the first batch of nodes, even if cron.php is called multiple times. The hack fix involves editing search.module to allow larger batches so all nodes make it into the first run. I added a "2000" item to the $items array on line 217, then cleared the old index by clicking the "Re-index site" button. Manually called cron.php and let it chew, and now all nodes are properly indexed. No idea if I'll have to keep re-indexing. That would be an ugly hack…

Update the Second: Looks like everything's updating ok now… I'll try dropping the batch size back down to a sane value to see if it still works (or if it really is just indexing the first batch of records only)

Update the Third: Yeah. All's well now. New content is being automatically indexed, and all old content is properly indexed. Wonder what happened…

Drupal Search Funkiness - resolved: it's now 100% indexed. no idea what was wrong before...Drupal Search Funkiness – resolved: it's now 100% indexed. no idea what was wrong before…

{ 9 comments }

Shaking the Google Addiction

November 7, 2005 · 3 comments

in Uncategorized

I’ve been such a total Google junkie since it kicked all of the search engine’s collective asses. Nothing else has come close, so I haven’t even bothered looking anywhere else for perhaps a couple of years now. It just hit me that I’m a little uncomfortable with that total reliance on one source (and their algorithms) for my searching.

So, following Mark Evans’ lead, I’m going to try going a week without Google. I’m not approaching this from a “Google is EVIL” angle – I think they’re the exact opposite – they’ve had opportunity to be evil, and have shown that they want to make the effort to be Good. I just need to take a look around to see what else is coming along…

First, I’m going to try Ice Rocket – kinda Google-like, but it’s been doing some cool stuff with RSS and blogs long before The Goog rolled that stuff out.

I think I should poke around and see if the Meta Search Aggregators are progressing. Remember Dog Pile? They were teh cool before Google ruled us all. (heh – just checked and it’s still running! I’ll have to check it out…)

Update: Woah. Just did a quick (Dogpile) search for “metasearch”, and came up with a bunch of candidates:

I haven’t done any research into legitimacy of any of these tools yet, and haven’t tried them out (except for Dog Pile), but there’s the (short, incomplete) list.

Update: Just did a search for “Calgary” on each of these metasearchers, and only 2 engines returned stuff that wasn’t mostly ads, or just piping in Google’s results. Dog Pile and Search AllInOne – of the two, Dog Pile was more useful.

{ 3 comments }