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<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite>Fennec Foxen wrote:<br>
But we like our own database servers and searches, don't we? And we<br>
have a perfectly good search system in place (it's only turned
off...<br>
something related to b0rk3d hardware. =/) Why pay even more for<br>
external searches when we can have our own?<br><br>
in reply to Catherine who wrote:
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<dd>Has anyone explored the Atomz Search application for use on
<dd>Wikipedia? (see http://www.atomz.com/applications/search/ and
also
<dd>their FAQ
<a href="http://www.atomz.com/applications/search/faq.htm" eudora="autourl">http://www.atomz.com/applications/search/faq.htm</a></blockquote>
</dl>We do not have a perfectly good search system -- it's been turned
off for many many months. And from my understanding it's not a
hardware problem, it's the fact that we don't have anyone who is really
expert at optimizing MySQL database searches. The search as written
now makes a massive hit on the servers, slowing down allover performance
unacceptably even though we have better hardware now. Ideally, we
could develop this internally, and perhaps run the searches on a mirror
site of some kind to minimize slowdowns, but either it's not a priority
among the developers or the expertise we need isn't among our volunteer
pool yet.<br><br>
Google is a wonderful thing, but it has its glitches (as documented on
the w:External Search Engines page -- we don't control when and which of
our pages are indexed, it often puts tangentially related topics in the
top ten ahead of the specific page you're looking for, it indexes empty
edit (&action=edit) pages, and so on. I admit I haven't tested
the Yahoo external search as much; results seem comparable.<br><br>
I'm not necessarily saying Atomz is THE answer, just asking if other
people with more intimate knowledge of our needs would take the time to
evaluate it. If the price is outrageous, then it's not an option,
but if not, it has many of the things we need *right now*, in a
plug-and-play solution that will work with our structure. <br><br>
Things that look appealing to me, quoted from their FAQ:<br><br>
* "a professional application hosted and maintained entirely on our
high-performance servers." - "High-capacity for searching
millions of pages"<br>
* "24x7 emergency support and other high end support
services"<br>
* "with a single Atomz Customer Login you can manage a different
search engine for many different Web sites" (int'l wikis)<br>
* "can be configured to access more than one domain by using our URL
Entrypoints feature" (en, en2, etc.)<br>
* "indexes HTML Web pages, static or dynamically generated,
including pages built from databases."<br>
* "can easily enable full content searching [...] or a more narrow
topic-based search [...] in the title, meta-description or meta-keywords
tags"<br>
* "A Collection allows visitors to search specific areas of your Web
site [..via..] a Drop down list or a group of check boxes"
(namespaces)<br>
* "<i>URL Masks </i>specify which pages on your site should be
included and excluded from indexing.; also respects <noindex> tags
and robots.txt."<br>
* "Incremental indexing enables companies to frequently index those
portions of their site which are dynamically changing."<br>
* "can utilize scripts or programs to initiate an incremental
index"<br>
* "will properly index Web pages using all of the common character
sets in use on the Internet today" including bidi, UTF-8, Arabic,
Chinese, etc.<br>
* "you can control [ordering of search results], which pages are
returned with 100% relevancy for a given search"<br>
* "search statistics for searches made by visitors on your
site"<br>
* template feature to match search results page to rest of site;
construct a results page that uses the language of your choice<br>
* template gives full control over what is displayed on results page
(title, context excerpt, relevance score, many more options)<br>
* can use simple single-text-box search on every page, and provide link
to an "Advanced Search" page with many more options,
including: <br>
** Case sensitivity controls<br>
** Excluded words controls<br>
** Bidirectional multiword acronym support <br>
** Synonym, phrase and acronym file upload from CSV or other
formats. <br>
** Sound-alike matching<br><br>
All of this would be very complicated for us to code ourselves by hand to
the same standard. Let's at least find out what the cost
would be?<br><br>
Just my two cents,<br>
Catherine<br><br>
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