Forums search poll is closing...

General Discussion
1

…in a few days. If you haven’t voted yet, cast your vote and make yourself heard.

2

Hi Mike -

I’ve always tried to use the search function and it seems to work pretty good as is. One bugaboo for me has been misspellings in a thread title.

A prime example is the original (and now famous) Bert Burger vacuum bagging thread. A search for “vacuum” won’t hit as the original was spelled “vacumn.” I’ve also seen the word spelled “Vacume”, “vaccume”, etc.

Maybe one of those search features is available that allows options to match spellings that are similar but not quite the same?

3

Thanks for the input John.

There’s been some grumbling over the search functionality on the new forums…one being the in ability to search for 3 letter words. I think that’s valid.

I’m considering using a Google Custom Search Engine – (CSE). It’s a custom search engine google lets you set up specifically for your site. It has all the power of a google search (super fast, accurate) as well as some other features including spelling. The only drawback from my perspective is that if you use the free service, they insert context relavent ads at the top and bottom of the search results. The paid service is a bit out of the range for swaylock’s right now and would probably run $2-3k/year.

There’s a couple other options I’m considering but they would require a bit more tinkering on my part.

Hence the poll.

mp

4

Viewing the ads never bothered me, but the time it takes to fetch the script and relavent ads always did. At times of heavy net use a huge number of computers are trying to connect to the same ad servers creating a bottleneck.

I don’t see them anymore because of a Host file - a simple file that maps hostnames to IP addresses - used as a supplement to (or instead of) the domain name system (dns) on networks. Basically all the google ad sites are mapped to my computer…Boom, no fetch time, no ads.

5

dukdiv,

That is ingenious – however if ad revenue dried up due to everyone using your method, so would swaylock’s.

Mike

6

oops…Fixed (from ashoquist)

btw the Keep Sways Alive! link doesn’t work on some pages because it’s pointing to http://www2.swaylocks.com/keep_sways_alive.html instead of http://www.swaylocks.com/keep_sways_alive.html.