# Search not working?



## Philippa

DearPrudence said:


> I think it has already been asked but as the search function is not working for me ...


Hello foreros!
Is anyone else having trouble searching? This quote is from the 'quoting within quotes' thread and I'm pretty sure I had asked about this (or at least contributed) before to a thread and today is the 3rd day I've tried searching for it ... it takes a really long time to search and then either returns a 'no matches' result or gives me a blank screen with IE saying 'Done' at the bottom. Is anyone else having similar problems at all?
Thank you!
Philippa


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## Jana337

No, it is very fast here. Does it happen only for the specific thread? If so, give us details (the keywords you used).


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## Philippa

Jana337 said:


> No, it is very fast here. Does it happen only for the specific thread? If so, give us details (the keywords you used).


Sometimes it works very slowly and sometimes it doesn't at all. It does seem to be especially upset by the search word 'quote'!!? (or possibly by me searching with several things - my name, C&S foro and the a key word)  Maybe it's an Internet Explorer thing? - the last few tries I got an IE error message (IE cannot display this page, maybe you aren't connected to the internet etc.)
P


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## Jana337

I think that it should be the faster, the more specific you are. If you tell it to search threads with more than 5 replies, not older than 2 months and in CS only, it should be grateful.


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## DearPrudence

Wow, but it's one of my quote! 
I didn't know that we had to note all that as I thought it was a general thing.
I know that in the last few days WR has not been working properly for me. Just a few minutes ago it was not longer working at all and this time I had an error message (but I think it was general as when I came back there were only 74 forer@s on the English-French forum).
But usually, as Philippa says, I have nothing, it just says "done" and that's it.
Just to add that I use Mozilla & I still have problems.
And maybe I should add that I also had a problem with my attachment yesterday but that it is alright now.

Anyway, now I will note it as my memory is really bad.
And an additional question: should we start a thread every time the forum is slow & doesn't work or is it normal that sometimes it doesn't work, it's the same for everybody and we should just wait?
Honestly I had always thought it was something normal and not specific to me or a particular forum.

But I think I remember the search function was not working properly in the English-French forum either so now I no longer say "use the search function" because I know that more often than not it doesn't work 
(and now I always copy my post before posting for fear of losing everything)


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## Philippa

Thank you for your comment, DearPrudence! I'm glad it's not just me.
I didn't report it straightaway as I thought it might just be a temporary blip, but usually searching works fine for me and I use it a lot.
Jana, I'm amazed that searching is supposed to work faster with more 'constraints' - I would have though it would then have to search and then search its results again and again to see which agree with all the conditions.


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## Jana337

Philippa said:


> Thank you for your comment, DearPrudence! I'm glad it's not just me.
> I didn't report it straightaway as I thought it might just be a temporary blip, but usually searching works fine for me and I use it a lot.
> Jana, I'm amazed that searching is supposed to work faster with more 'constraints' - I would have though it would then have to search and then search its results again and again to see which agree with all the conditions.


Hm...  I don't really know how it works but if it works intelligently, searching in a smaller subset must be logically faster.


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## jann

> I don't really know how it works but if it works intelligently, searching in a smaller subset must be logically faster.


This makes sense to me... but I'm not sure if the limits are on the search itself, or just on the results displayed. A search on the word "quote" will necessarily find every single thread where someone has used the quote feature to cite another post, because the little blue citation box is always introduced by the word "Quote." 

I just launched a search on the word "quote" without any restrictions... it ran for about 30 seconds and then returned a blank (frozen?) page. If I restrict the search to C&S, and even to posts in C&S within the last 24hrs, it still returns a blank page. I tested this several times, and sometimes I even got a "cannot find server" error.

When I search the much less common word "quoted" in C&S, however, I get 62 thread results in about 1.5 seconds. When I search "quoted" in all open forums, I get 500 results (the maximum) in about 1.5 seconds.

These symptoms might support the dual theory that (1) searches that find more hits run more slowly and (2) restrictions are applied to the results, not the search.

Hmmmm.


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## Philippa

Thank you, Jann, very interesting. I had wondered about the word 'quote' appearing a lot, but I was so sure that if I also put in titles only, C and S only and posts by Philippa, I would get something!! Trying the word 'quoting' was hugely better!!
What do you mean by restrictions are applied to the results, not the search and how can you tell that from your 'search experiment'?


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## DearPrudence

I have done my homework and noted what didn't work today (not about the search function I'm afraid):

20:34 PM (GMT + 2)
Have just created my thread on English only forum.
Wanting to go to English only forum, "done"

20:38: viewing a thread in the French-English forum, back to French-English: "done"

20:45 From English-French to new posts

Well after that I went to work 

But to be honest I'm used to this kind of things & I'm not even angry anymore when it happens. And it's OK as when I came back to WR page it worked immediately (I know that it hasn't always been the case).

I don't think that's helpful but just tell me to stop otherwise I will fill pages like that


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## jann

Philippa said:
			
		

> What do you mean by restrictions are applied to the results, not the search and how can you tell that from your 'search experiment'?


Well, I'm just guessing about how the search engine might be functioning, but here is my logic:

Say we're looking for threads with the word "quote" that have been active in C&S in the last 24 hrs. One option would be for the search engine to ignore all threads outside of C&S and older than 24hrs. It would peform the search just within the subset, and return the results.

A second option would be for the search engine to look everywhere, in all the forums, from all dates. It would find all the thousands of instances of the word "quote" that must be out there. Then it would apply a filter to these results, so that when it displayed them to us, it only showed threads in C&S that have been active in the last 24hrs. This is what I meant when I said "restrictions applied to the results."

We know there shouldn't be more than a handful of threads that meet our restrictions (active in C&S in the last 24hrs), so this should be a rather small subset of threads to search. Yet I had problems, and the search engine crashed just the same as if I did not limit the search at all. This makes me suspect that the search engine might be looking for the word "quote" everywhere! Then when it came time to display the search results (assuming it didn't crash), it would only show the ones in C&S that were less than 24hrs old.

It's just a theory, and it might be totally wrong...


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