The ntl Community database - A serious flaw

Theodoric · 01-07-2003, 21:47

This MySQL stoplist in their Search engine is proving to be a killer. If you choose the wrong form of words, it simply abandons the search rather than working around the offending word (or words).

An example. Say you are trying to find out how to measure your Internet speed.

You type 'speed' in the search box'' and you get a long list of hits, one of which is 'How can I test the speed of my internet connection'.

However if you type 'speed of internet connection' in the search box to cut down the number of unwanted hits, it abandons the search with the error message 'Sorry but the word "of" is on the MySQL stoplist'.

I'm sure you can find other examples.

EDIT All the examples were entered into the Search box without the quotes.

Alan Waddington · 01-07-2003, 21:49

I tried "email doesn't work" with the same result.

Theodoric · 01-07-2003, 21:53

Quote:

Originally posted by Andre
ROFL-Looks like it's up to ntl's usual 'high' standards then.

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.

Theodoric · 01-07-2003, 22:07

Quote:

Originally posted by Alan Waddington
I tried "email doesn't work" with the same result.

I tried a North of the Border 'email dinna work' which gave the response 'no matches found'.

More seriously, a simple 'email' gave a large number of hits. So it would seem that if you try to refine your query, it will simply give up rather than giving the default result on 'email in this example. So, again, the wrong choice of words could prevent the database from giving you a lead to a possible solution.

I also tried 'email problems', but the titles of the 4 hits didn't seem to have any connection to email problems - one of them was 'Online Gaming'.

I suspect that I could go on and on finding problems, but why bother.

We want Google!

01-07-2003, 23:22

Also the links to the speed test sites don't work under the heading "How can I test the speed of my internet connection?"
And it would be helpful to be able to read more than just the last 3 entries in the 'service status'.

wylco! · 02-07-2003, 12:03

I entered both "OIA" and "Open Internet Access".
I wasn't surprised to find that the search provided nothing!

ntlrebel · 02-07-2003, 12:37

That's right.

Shoot it down before you give it a chance.

A bit everyone yelling about them closing the site and saying I'm not going to reg anyway else, and low & behold..........here we all are again.

eddie00001 · 02-07-2003, 12:40

What's the link to it?

ntlrebel · 02-07-2003, 12:48

CLICK HERE.

02-07-2003, 15:13

Quote:

Originally posted by ntlrebel
That's right. Shoot it down before you give it a chance. A bit everyone yelling about them closing the site and saying I'm not going to reg anyway else, and low & behold..........here we all are again.

I think it's helpful to ntl that we are pointing out errors on the new site.
It's constructive critisism.

btw... it looks like the service status box at the bottom is only showing problems reported this month (as it is now showing 4 entries) even though there are problems from last month that still haven't been resolved.

poolking · 02-07-2003, 16:30

Anyone else getting this error on the service statis box at the bottom:

An error occurred on the server when processing the URL. Please contact the system administrator.

02-07-2003, 17:56

Yep, I'm getting that as well now.

btw...let your mouse pointer hover over the words "Service Status".

poolking · 02-07-2003, 18:21

Quote:

Originally posted by XFS03
Yep, I'm getting that as well now.

btw...let your mouse pointer hover over the words "Service Status".

Hmm,

Your Account.

Looks very professional.

PaulS · 08-07-2003, 11:15

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.

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.)