The search box on www.freebsd.org..

[Wolfram Schneider]

On 5/11/07, John Baldwin <jhb at freebsd.org> wrote:
> On Thursday 10 May 2007 05:20:52 pm Wolfram Schneider wrote:
> > On 5/10/07, John Baldwin <jhb at freebsd.org> wrote:
> > > SUCKS/BLOWS CHUNKS/etc.
> > >
> > > Really, it's bad.  I just typed in 'logo' to find the page about logo
> usage,
> > > and it returned 0 results, not even http://www.freebsd.org/logo.html.
> That's
> > > exceedingly lame.
> >
> > You typed an evil query which crashed the search program with signal 11.
> > ('logos' works fine).
> >
> > The search program was written long time ago in C, a language with
> > a terrible memory management. You have to spend half of your
> > development time fixing memory leaks and off-by-one buffer bugs. 15
> > years ago nobody cared about bad C programming style.
> >
> > Feel free to debug our search program. I don't have the time myself.
>
> I think this is another reason why we should just use someone else's search
> service instead of rolling our own.  We simply don't have the resources to
> maintain our own custom engine and haven't for years now.

just for the record, we are using someone else's search software
ports/net/freewais-sf  with minor bugfixes.


> > > Its worse than having no search box at all because people
> > > will try to _use_ it and then get frustrated.  It should either be killed,
> or
> > > it should be replaced with something that actually _works_ (probably it
> > > should make use of Y!, Google, or Rambler.ru something to do the search).

All search engines sucks more ore less. Ask our postmaster ....
Most Open Source search engines crashes if you feed them with more
than 1_000_000 records.

-Wolfram

-- 
Wolfram Schneider <wosch at FreeBSD.org> http://wolfram.schneider.org