Quote:
Originally posted by Theodoric
However, in the interests of pure techy geekiness, can anyone explain to us what is actually going wrong in their search engine.
PS If you have a solution, I'm sure we'll all forgive you if you keep stumm here and try to sell it to ntl.
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Techy geekiness ahoy!
As a guess from what people are saying, I'd say they're doing a single keyword search rather than breaking all the words down in to a list of words to search on and doing an 'AND' search on each word.
So... if you search on 'speed' it'll search for any page containing the word 'speed', however, if you search for 'speed of internet connection' it will search for just that, the words "speed of internet connection" all together as if it was one word, rather than finding pages that have "speed" and "of" and "internet" and "connection" on the same page.
The second way of doing the search 'properly' is a bit harder to code as you have to treat the search term as a list and create a loop through the list to create the SQL command which gets run against the database. Still, it's not too tricky and I'm sure if a few people point it out to whoever works on their website they'll get around to changing it at some point.
Please bear in mind that as they've just launched the community site, the web bods might have a long list of stuff they're monitoring and having to fix at the moment so it might take them a while get around to a fix for this. I'm not saying what NTL has done with ntlw.com and the new community site is right, I'm just seeing it from the side of the people who're probably doing the work and getting bombarded with errors that are more serious at the moment. However, it was a bit of a silly way to code the search system and I'm sure someone'll be embarrassed enough to sort it out (eventually.)