1. RDS web-page search
Hello all, RDS?
I was playing around with the RDS web site and trying to see
what I could do with the search engine on the recent users
contributions page.
The first thing I noticed is that the search engine uses a
logical OR and doesn's seem to support any thing else.
For example: I type: "Lewis Townsend" w/o the quotes and
I get everything I ever contributed plus one from Mathew Lewis
Not that I have problem with Mathew ;) but I tried to exclude
him from the results by trying the following:
using quotes arround "Lewis Townsend"
This only returned one of my contributions. I guess a
left over from a time that that these entries had quotes
around them.
typing "Lewis and Townsend" w/o quotes
This gave me a bunch of results that have no reference to
my name but I assume DO have the word "and" in them.
Note that my stuff was in there too and near the top.
Then I wondered: "what if I want to find all contributions
that have been voted for in the micro-economy"
The word "happy" or "happy.gif" seems to work if anyone
is interested. I then tried finding all stamped items.
"stamp" or "stamp.gif" works for this. However, the
next thing I tried was to find all DOS programs or all
windows or linux programs. I looked at the html source of
the page (I trust that wasn't immoral) and noticed that the
pink color of dos programs is caused by the
bgcolor="#FFCCCC"
clause in the <tr> tag. I thought that I was really clever
when I typed "FFCCCC" into the search box but I got no
results. I tried several variations and one for windows too
but no luck. I assume that the search engine just searches for
phrases after the <tr> and not inside it.
Well, I guess the main thing I was wondering is if it would
be too hard to expand the capabilities of the search engine
on the RDS website. If it's just for me, don't bother, but
it might be handy for others too.
later,
Lewis Townsend
keroltarr at hotmail.com
http://geocities.com/keroltarr/
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2. Re: RDS web-page search
Lewis Townsend writes:
> Well, I guess the main thing I was wondering is if it would
> be too hard to expand the capabilities of the search engine
> on the RDS website.
Each time you run it, the search program reads the HTML on the
Recent User Contributions and Archive pages.
It strips out most, but not all, of the "noise", such as formatting
information, font etc. For each entry, it counts the number of
matches against the words that you type. There is no
"and" or "or" logic implemented. Quotes are not
handled properly either, so you can't search for phrases, just words.
I suppose "a b c" will search for a single word: "a b c" that must
appear on one-line of HTML - not that useful.
Case is not significant. If a word contains less than
3 characters, it must match a full word, not a substring.
The score for an entry is the sum of the square roots
of the individual word-counts. e.g. searching
for Lewis Townsend, if "lewis"
occurs 4 times in an entry, it only counts as 2 points.
An entry with both "lewis" and "townsend" will
score 1+1=2. An entry with
"lewis" twice, but no "townsend" will only
score 1.414 (root of 2).
Thus entries that match multiple distinct words
will tend to be favored over entries that match the same
word many times.
You will often get a huge number of matches,
but we sort the results by score, and feed them out to you
15 at a time, so they start to appear quickly.
Usually only the top few items are relevant, but it doesn't
hurt to get more (you can always press Stop on your browser).
We've had requests to add a check box to select
DOS or Windows or Linux or any combination,
but I didn't feel it was that useful, since many of the
programs labelled as DOS will actually work on 2 or
3 platforms, not just DOS, plus it's not hard to visually
filter the colors in the search results.
Regards,
Rob Craig
Rapid Deployment Software
http://www.RapidEuphoria.com
