Re: Mail search problem.

[Geoff Hutchison <ghutchis at wso dot williams dot edu>]

At the risk of going off-topic, I'll try to respond to this. I'll be glad
to answer any questions about the search software off-list (or on the htdig
lists).

>A search on "All words" for "i386 float" generates 190 matches.
>Since I was told that Craig was the author, I tried:

Personally, I would have tried x86 if i386 didn't work. The search engine
has a list of synonyms, but it's based mostly on general English text.
Compiler lingo, naturally has a different subset of synonyms. :-) Clearly a
targeted synonym file would help.

>search engine doesn't seem to be doing what would be expected.
>Removing the indicies from the search would help, at least.

While I don't know about the structure of the egcs mailing archives, this
may be easier said than done. Perhaps the best way to do this naturally is
to insert <meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow"> into the indexes.
But this doesn't help older indexes unless someone does it by hand.

I also don't know if Hans-Peter is using backlink weighting, but I usually
find that ht://Dig tries to downweight mailing list indexes when it's used.


-Geoff Hutchison
Williams Students Online
http://wso.williams.edu/