Improved Search Results.

I am working on improving the search results on LS Blogs, the search functions have been a little lacking up till now, and they still need a lot of work.

Over the coming months I will be fixing the search routines to provide a much better service, at the moment I have just tweaked the code so it only returns the first 300 matches found, this stopped the memory error that some people may have experienced.

Its not perfect, but at least it doesnt crash now….

I will be adding advanced search functions at some point in the future, and making the search results a lot more relevant and easy to use, but it will all take time - but should be worth the wait.

No doubt the search will go through a few changes before I am finnished, as I learn from mistakes, and find the best way forward. There is a lot of data to search, and I dont have a army of coders working for me (its just little old me doing it all…), nor do I have an array of computers working behind the scenes.

So I need to make sure that whichever method I choose isnt to intensive for the server to cope with, as it has to serve the site out, as well as perform searches or index the data at the same time. Plus, finding a way to filter out duplicate results, which is a problem at the moment will be fun

Ideally I want to make the search fast, and easy to use, with the emphasis on returning useful results that are easy to understand.

Plenty of ideas on things I can do, its just finding the time, and figuring out the best ways to do certain things.

With a bit of luck though, this time next year the search will be a lot better