Don't Waste Time on Fedora Mailing List Archive Searches - Search Engine Broken
M. Fioretti
mfioretti at mclink.it
Mon Mar 14 05:41:36 UTC 2005
On Sun, Mar 13, 2005 13:55:57 PM -0500, Mark Weaver
(mdw1982 at mdw1982.com) wrote:
>
> actually, its been my experience and also my personal opinion that to
> include rather than trim previous bits from previous posts adds more
> weight and makes things easier to find with "good" search utilities
Correct, I know that. This is not the case with the search engine of
the current archives, but certainly is with Google. However:
0) "I can make a mess because somebody else will surely clean up"???
> by virtue of the fact that there are simply "more" keywords to
> search on.
1) "More" is relative. If there is one complete description out of 1 MB
of archive or ten copies of it in 10 MB the search result is just as
good. But happens _faster_.
2) The time wasted manually scrolling web pages or the original
messages into an inbox, to search where the one line of new
information may be, remains. That is not a personal preference, is
a fact. And, in my experience, is quite more than the time waiting
for Google to find the initial point. Sorry, my fault to not have
specified before that I also thought to manual search of the
relevant parts, _after_ some search engine made a result list.
Yes, of course this behavior on lists makes me grumpy. That's why
I posted :-). Because one or two extra seconds when posting can save a
*lot* of time to everybody who will need that message in the future
(**).
Ciao,
Marco
(**) ... and a lot of people can still access the Internet only by
pay-per-minute or pay-per-byte dialup. And even more should soon find
themselves in the same boat with mobile access, just on a much smaller
screen. It would be interesting to calculate how much MONEY those
users are forced to spend by behavior like yours, but this is another
story.
--
Marco Fioretti mfioretti, at the server mclink.it
Fedora Core 3 for low memory http://www.rule-project.org/
May your campfire always burn bright
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