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Thread: Having trouble with search engine

  1. #1

    Having trouble with search engine

    I find that I can't get the search engine on this website to produce results when I know they are present. E.g. - I know there are multiple posts containing "53H", but a search of the Euph Mouthpiece forum comes up empty. Can anyone help? Thanks.

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Jan 2006
    Location
    West Palm Beach, FL
    Posts
    3,850
    You're right. Not sure what is wrong. I've had similar problems other times. Not sure what is wrong.
    Rick Floyd
    Miraphone 5050 - Warburton BJ / RF mpc
    YEP-641S (recently sold)
    Doug Elliott - 102 rim; I-cup; I-9 shank


    "Always play with a good tone, never louder than lovely, never softer than supported." - author unknown.
    Symphonic Band of the Palm Beaches
    El Cumbanchero (Raphael Hernandez, arr. Naohiro Iwai)
    Chorale and Shaker Dance
    (John Zdechlik)

  3. #3
    The problem is that the software won't allow searches that are too short. I'll see if I an adjust that. In the meantime, use this search term in Google:

    site:www.dwerden.com 53H

    Lots of results there! Here is the direct link to the results:

    https://www.google.com/search?q=site...hrome&ie=UTF-8
    Dave Werden (ASCAP)
    Euphonium Soloist, U.S. Coast Guard Band, retired
    Adams Artist (Adams E3)
    Alliance Mouthpiece (DC3)
    YouTube: dwerden
    Facebook: davewerden
    Twitter: davewerden
    Instagram: davewerdeneuphonium

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Jan 2006
    Location
    West Palm Beach, FL
    Posts
    3,850
    Thanks Dave,

    Didn't know there was a length requirement. That explains why '321' search didn't work, but '5050' does.
    Rick Floyd
    Miraphone 5050 - Warburton BJ / RF mpc
    YEP-641S (recently sold)
    Doug Elliott - 102 rim; I-cup; I-9 shank


    "Always play with a good tone, never louder than lovely, never softer than supported." - author unknown.
    Symphonic Band of the Palm Beaches
    El Cumbanchero (Raphael Hernandez, arr. Naohiro Iwai)
    Chorale and Shaker Dance
    (John Zdechlik)

  5. #5
    I looked around a bit and the setting is not only in the forum's control panel (where I can change it) but it is also set on the database server itself (which I can't change), so we may be stuck with the limit for now.
    Dave Werden (ASCAP)
    Euphonium Soloist, U.S. Coast Guard Band, retired
    Adams Artist (Adams E3)
    Alliance Mouthpiece (DC3)
    YouTube: dwerden
    Facebook: davewerden
    Twitter: davewerden
    Instagram: davewerdeneuphonium

  6. #6
    Join Date
    Dec 2011
    Location
    Central North Carolina
    Posts
    2,362
    This is a common problem in a lot of "low grade" search engines. It is a simple approach used to address the problem of getting too many results (many of which are spurious) because a short sequence of characters has a high probability of many matches in most corpora of any size. Better search engines make use of contextual or linguistic/structural/semantic knowledge to guide the search algorithm or heuristic. Part of what you see in these cases is "you get what you pay for" (or perhaps in the case of Google, you get what at least somebody has paid for one way or another). I do (after being involved in developing similar sorts of technology in scientific areas for about 20 years) continue to find it irritating to encounter such "features" on many commercial sites. But for fora like this, I just go with the flow because I understand the trade offs. (Though to be honest, it wouldn't take the developers THAT much effort to implement a better search engine given what is now freely available in various areas. But it's a feature that got implemented years ago and has in general proved to be "good enough" that they don't get too many complaints about it.)
    Gary Merrill
    Wessex EEb Bass tuba (DW 3XL or 2XL)
    Mack Brass Compensating Euph (DE N106, Euph J, J9 euph)
    Amati Oval Euph (DE 104, Euph J, J6 euph)
    1924 Buescher 3-valve Eb tuba (with std US receiver), Kelly 25
    Schiller American Heritage 7B clone bass trombone (DE LB K/K10/112/14 Lexan, Brass Ark MV50R)
    1947 Olds "Standard" trombone (Olds #3)

  7. #7
    In defense of the forum software, this one is not freeware. In fact, neither was the previous version of the forum. The software itself does allow me to set a lower threshold, but I'm working on that. I changed it to 3, but it's still not working. I'll open a support ticket to see if it is solvable.
    Dave Werden (ASCAP)
    Euphonium Soloist, U.S. Coast Guard Band, retired
    Adams Artist (Adams E3)
    Alliance Mouthpiece (DC3)
    YouTube: dwerden
    Facebook: davewerden
    Twitter: davewerden
    Instagram: davewerdeneuphonium

  8. #8
    Join Date
    Dec 2011
    Location
    Central North Carolina
    Posts
    2,362
    My comment wasn't directed towards "freeware" or "open source", etc. In fact, some open source stuff is much more sophisticated. But most is not. This is mostly a matter of the degree to which an application like this is actually designed from the beginning towards what the users need as opposed to what is convenient for the developers to implement. The fact of the matter is that virtually all applications like this just aren't oriented towards the genuine needs of the users and are instead oriented towards what software developers (who are among the very worst people at genuine application design) find easy to do given what is available in "canned" forms in their development environments. And these problems of what Edward Tufte refers to as "user abuse" span academia as well as the corporate and commercial worlds.

    The fact that the software allows you to set a lower threshold but that it's "not working" means that it doesn't actually allow you to do that. It's at least a bug. And if it's not freeware, then the vendor should fix the bug and provide a release in which it is fixed. However, beyond that, I think it won't really matter. If you change the threshold enough, you'll get more hits on your searches for something like '53H', but the cost of that will be that you'll get more specious hits on any number of other 3-character terms. Honestly, the simpler approach -- as a matter of practice -- is to use Google in exactly the way you've indicated, since Google is a GOOD (intelligent) search engine. This is one of those "can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear" situations, and I think you shouldn't waste your time trying to "tune" a fundamentally inadequate search engine to produce results that it was never designed for. The Google solution is a good one (even though somewhat indirect), and you just won't be able to do better no matter how much tuning of parameters you do on the local search engine.

    People have learned to take the same approach with searching for things on any number of commercial sites such as Walmart or Lowes. Using Google is almost always better than a local search (unless the site has licensed Google search!). No matter what you do to tweak the local search engine, you're not going to get anywhere near the results that you will just by using Google in the way you've described. And the Google approach is easy. Don't stress over trying to make a bread knife into a scalpel. Life's too short . This forum software supports a lot of nice features. It's pretty good. If it doesn't support a really useful search capability, that hardly distinguishes it from virtually all other forum software and commercial and academic sites.

    My 2 cents.
    Gary Merrill
    Wessex EEb Bass tuba (DW 3XL or 2XL)
    Mack Brass Compensating Euph (DE N106, Euph J, J9 euph)
    Amati Oval Euph (DE 104, Euph J, J6 euph)
    1924 Buescher 3-valve Eb tuba (with std US receiver), Kelly 25
    Schiller American Heritage 7B clone bass trombone (DE LB K/K10/112/14 Lexan, Brass Ark MV50R)
    1947 Olds "Standard" trombone (Olds #3)

  9. #9
    Thanks all. I'll just use Google going forward.

  10. #10
    Google is a good option, but I've learned a little more. The forum software is allowing 3 characters, but the database is not. Because it is a shared db, I can't change the setting there.

    HOWEVER, you can get around this to some extent by using the asterisk (*) wildcard before and after the 3-character string, like this:

    *53H*
    or this
    *321*
    Dave Werden (ASCAP)
    Euphonium Soloist, U.S. Coast Guard Band, retired
    Adams Artist (Adams E3)
    Alliance Mouthpiece (DC3)
    YouTube: dwerden
    Facebook: davewerden
    Twitter: davewerden
    Instagram: davewerdeneuphonium

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