Google Search

[yokuchi]

Feedback...

I despise the new search thingy. The old one allowed for customization of the search parameters, Google doesn't.

Here's a whole page of paranoid propaganda that describes why Google sucks... [url]http://www.google-watch.org/bigbro.html[/url]

*Whine, grovel, beg, bitch, moan* Switch it baaaccckkkk!

[Mr. Tines]

OTOH, we don't have the forum seizing up as the phpBB database grows beyond the limits it was designed for.

If all else fails, Google advanced search gives finer control if you don't remember the syntax

[Ornette]

Feedback...

I despise the new search thingy. The old one allowed for customization of the search parameters, Google doesn't.

Here's a whole page of paranoid propaganda that describes why Google sucks... [url]http://www.google-watch.org/bigbro.html[/url]

*Whine, grovel, beg, bitch, moan* Switch it baaaccckkkk!

If we wanted to keep the old search, we'd have to move to a dedicated hosting plan, which is $180 a month at the very lowest end and $400 a month for a halfway decent server.

[THE Hal E. Burton 9000]

while I would cede that Google has become an internet-based advertising agency that masquerades as a search engine, I do think the total lack of customizable search parameters are something which I am not happy with either

[Reichu]

If we open a PayPal account and people put enough $$$ into it to afford the sort of hosting Ornette mentioned, you can get customizable search parameters back. Is that what you realllllllly want?

[BEsERk EVA01]

Why can't Aaron pay for it? He practically created the site, anyway.

Hmm...why don't we gather round all the really, really rich users on the forums and have them pay for it? They'll say it's an honour to be serving Evangelion, and they'll pay for it.

Omg, Reichu, that avatar makes you look soooo weird!

[Ornette]

You can't be serious.

Why can't Aaron pay for it? He practically created the site, anyway.

The iPowerWeb hosting service that evamonkey.com runs on is about $8-10 a month, about how much the hosting fees of the current site are now, both are shared hosting. Compare that to $180, a month, every month, for a search function.

Hmm...why don't we gather round all the really, really rich users on the forums and have them pay for it? They'll say it's an honour to be serving Evangelion, and they'll pay for it.

Do you know of any really rich users of this site that find enough utility in it that they would pay for it? And it would have to be a reliable source of cashflow, otherwise if a user disappears, the site goes down.

I'm certainly not going to ask anyone to shell out that much money simply for a search function.

[THE Hal E. Burton 9000]

um, who(m) exactly is paying for this site and stuff anyway?

[Sailor Star Dust]

From what I remember, Ornette, Driaian (sp), and Monkey have something to do with it.

I'd be thankful we at least HAVE a search function. When Ornette told me one was taken down because of lack of money, I seriously thought that meant that we had NO search function whatsoever.

IMO, the google search function helped more than the original one.

If people are gonna be whining about it, then THEY should shell out the money needed to pay for the damn thing instead of selfishly bitching that the Admins/Mods should do something--they already have enough on their plate as it is.

[Reichu]

And the Google search really isn't that bad; one just has to adjust a little.

OMF paid for over a year's worth of hosting in advance. I forget the actual number. Ornette probably knows.

A PayPal account wouldn't be a bad thing, though, assuming people actually put money into it.

[THE Hal E. Burton 9000]

I might be willing to throw a few bucks at EGF/FGP each month

[Sailor Star Dust]

I'd personally be willing to put some money into (the) Paypal account for the Wiki in general, though it wouldn't be a whole lot. (Me is a full time student.)

[The Bastard King]

I wouldn't. I'm greedy. =P

But I don't really use the search function a lot anyways.

[Ornette]

Via Zuggy's suggestion, I wrote a script to generate all the topic titles in a given forum and write it out into a rudimentary HTML document. This way, you can at the very least search through the document for relevant topic titles.

Here they be:
Evageeks.org News and Feedback
EvaGeeks Wiki Discussion
Evangelion Chit-Chat
Evangelion Discussion
Rebuild of Evangelion
Fandom Area
Everything Else Evangelion
Related Works & People
Completely and Utterly Off-Topic
AnimeNation Archive

[Mr. Tines]

Search seems to have stopped working for me at all. It goes away, thinks for a while, then comes back with the search page and no results.

Anyone else finding this?

[Ornette]

Search seems to have stopped working for me at all. It goes away, thinks for a while, then comes back with the search page and no results.

Anyone else finding this?

Maybe it's a regional thing? Zuggy seemed to have issues with it as well. Does it work ok for other people outside of the U.S.?

[Sailor Star Dust]

Actually the other day when I was looking for a topic that should still be around I couldn't find anything.

It was originally a post by Shin-Seiki about some quotes that people said: one was from somebody from Eva that more or less said at a Con who's soul was in Unit-00 although he didn't understand the question (said something about Touji's unit in the reply) and the other one was from Yoshiyuki Tomino, which I provided some lines from an Animerica Interview of his.

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

OMF paid for over a year's worth of hosting in advance. I forget the actual number.

Two years in fact. It was a "Code Monster Sale" if I remember correctly. It runs out on 2009-09-17, which gives us plenty of time to come up with the probably ~$400 bill next time around.

The current search situation is not optimal. I can understand why we had to disable it. I remember think that the search tables seemed very large and verbose when I was doing the transfer, so it wasn't all that surprising to find out it was causing some serious technical issues.

Ideally, we should look into upgrading/changing the forum software. But is there anything out there that solves the search problem? Is it even something that can be solved? Until such time as we find a solution, or acquire a billionaire patron, I'm afraid we're stuck with google search.

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

I've updated the topic titles location to update daily. The topics can be found at the following location

http://evageeks.org/forum/thread_lists/

This is obviously not optimal, but we're making the best of a bad situation. I'll also try adding a link to these thread lists in the search form.
EDIT:
The link has been added to the search form. What a Hackathon!

[Zuggy]

Via Zuggy's suggestion, I wrote a script to generate all the topic titles in a given forum and write it out into a rudimentary HTML document. This way, you can at the very least search through the document for relevant topic titles.

Nice!

One of the problems I'm having is even if I know the topic title or the exact contents of one of the posts in that topic the Google search doesn't return any results if that post is over a certain age - so when I searched for "Rei book" "Rei's book" "book episode 9" it returned the Interesting Details in Rebuild thread but nothing older. I haven't had any trouble with it not returning anything at all like Mr. Tines describes tho'.

Maybe Google only searches through the posts made since the forum was moved to evageeks?