Jimbo, I sent you a zillion mails today (your night;), with a better search engine among them.
Magnus
-----Original Message----- From: wikipedia-l-admin@nupedia.com [mailto:wikipedia-l-admin@nupedia.com]On Behalf Of Jimmy Wales Sent: Saturday, January 26, 2002 10:06 PM To: wikipedia-l@nupedia.com Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] rate of change
Lars Aronsson wrote:
Would it be reasonable to update the search index each time a new version of a page is saved? In that case, the search would still be indexed (and fast), but it would always be up-to-date.
This is true now, since the pages are in a true database with Magnus's new software. In the old version, all the data was just stored in text files on disk. I wrote a program to go through and analyze the keywords from all the pages and titles, and construct a search index from that.
I always wanted to put it on a cron job to update nightly, but it was so inefficient that I didn't feel comfortable letting it run without supervision, and I didn't feel comfortable running it all that often.
Now that everything is in a real database, it should be true that with a little playing around and tweaking, we can get decent results that are fast and also always instantly updated.
The current version is a very simple SQL query. It doesn't work so well in terms of being intelligent about returning what you probably want. [Wikipedia-l] To manage your subscription to this list, please go here: http://www.nupedia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l