Site search

[denise]

We noticed that the site search was having some difficulties yesterday, so mark switched the indexing to run every 12 hours instead of every 6 hours. (This means that search results will now be delayed up to 12 hours, not up to 6.)

Sometime in the next few weeks, depending on when we can schedule it for best results, we'll be taking search offline for about a day or so to do some upgrade and efficiency work on the machine that hosts it. (As mark called it, "spring cleaning".) We'll let you know when.

Comments

[iguana]

Have you looked at Xapian? It's also free and open source, and since it's C++ (with various language bindings) rather than Java I imagine it takes up considerably less system resource. I've used Xapian personally and professionally and it's lovely to work with.

[denise]

If you were talking to us, we use Sphinx!

[iguana]

Python <3

Sphinx has a clever little JS search engine, indeed. From the source code it looks like it does Python server-side indexing and JS client-side searching. Clever, but not going to be very speedy.

[denise]

*nod* We traded off speed for ease of implementation and maintenance -- it was what Mark knew. When it gets to the point where the indexing is too long to run, we'll start looking into switching to a more low-level language, but for now it's working for us!