Mon, March 29, 2004
Good news, everyone! I finally decided to get smart about this site's search functionality. In the bad old days, it was a literal match kind of thing, which was great if you were searching for something very specific, but poor otherwise. Lately, I switched to fuzzier relevance-based matching, which searches for all the words in your query and ranks results according to how well they fit. This was great for finding things without having to know an exact phrase. (Searching for Bush evil, for example, would get you the right stuff even if the phrase "Bush evil" didn't appear in the text exactly.) But the problem there is, the more words in your query, the more results will match at least one of them – searching for something specific had a tendency to muddy the waters. (The least likely matches were way at the bottom, but still.) Now, I've added Google-style "exact phrase" matching, to achieve the best of both worlds. Wrap quotes around a phrase to include it in your search – while fundamentally terrible will net you a huge result set, "fundamentally terrible" will point you right at the Survivor: All-Stars articles.
I hope to add Google's minus-sign feature very soon, also.
