Search Feature: What the heck were you using it for?
 

Call me ignorant (many people have before) but what the heck is everyone so hung up about the search feature? What they heck is so important that thousands of people were searching every day?

Obviously enough of you were using it to turn the board into a super slow piece of shit, so many of you are using it. What the heck are you using it for?

I suspect all noobs used it for what we use Google etc. for.

IMO, GFY's search should only be used when looking for information that's kind of too specific to find on the standard engines, like "top converting ebony".
That's what must've been wrong, tons of people looking for "mad money" / "submit tutorial".

A forum without a search feature is like a man without ...enis

many people come here like every two days and then they start the GFY experience with searching for all the threads where they posted recently to see if someone replied to them etc or how the threads developed

then there are people searching for their name to see if someone mentioned them, wanted to get in touch etc

then there are people searching for sponsors etc

then there are sponsors searching for people who mentioned their program or who made "spam me with (...) sponsors" threads

im sure there are many more exmaples where the search feature is used

people like you RawAlex may be also searching for words like "Zango" or "torrents" or "spyware" :winkwink:

i used the "new posts" search a lot....

If I ever do business with someone in adult I search their posts on GFY first... as I'm sure a lot of people do

I wanted to find a niche-specific sponsor yesterday, and the fucking search is broken. Board is useless without it.

:thumbsup:thumbsup:2 cents:

Umm, no. Sorry. I don't use the search feature here very often at all.

So far, nobody has put up a reason why they miss it so much.

If people put useful information in their sigs (say like their email address or ICQ contact) then searching for "bob, can you hit me up" in a thread would be meaningless, because they people looking for you would just hit you up.

Obviously by the change in the speed of the board, some people must have been doing tens of thousands of searches a day. What was everyone looking for (that couldn't be found by looking at the titles in the first two pages)?

:thumbsup :winkwink:

bring the search back! :2 cents:

What kind of shitty isp were you on that it was so slow anyway? I never had problems with speed.

Since GFY doesn't use b-o-a-r-d-t-r-a-c-k-e-r I used it about once a week to see if anyone was ragging on me ;)

It's also useful to find contact info. For instance, when you were looking for a contact for Sunny's Money, you could have searched Sunny's ID and found posts of hers which had her ICQ and email in her sig :)

Someone who works in the adult internet industry actually has to ask what people are using a search feature on a forum for? That's like asking what people who use the internet find useful about Google.

Jim, what the fuck? I know what it is for, but obviously people are over using it to the max.

Seriously, the question is this: If there are 10,000 active webmasters coming to this board each day, each searching ONCE, I don't see the problem. But turning off search suddenly turned this board into lightening quick, which would suggest that there were all sorts of searches going on all the time bogging the whoel network down.

I have a feeling that some people may have been running bots looking for "is she hot" threads so they go could sig whore or something.

How many searches a day would you do? 1? 2? 200?


Perhaps if everyone was limited to 1 search every 12 hours?

Like Polish Aristocrat said above I used search for a number of things, including searching on people's handles to find info about them, various topics, technical questions, about companies, about specific mentions of things I care about related to adult webmastering, videography, various apps I want to try, whatever.

I might not do a search for weeks and then do a half dozen in one day if I felt like it. The board should be able to handle this. Taking the search away makes this board very much less useful. How anyone can argue against the utility of the search strikes me as insane. The limit they had where you can do only one search every minute or so was fine by me.

For the record I never felt that the board moved too slow. It normally works just fine for me here on aDSL. The slight speed increase of the responsiveness of the pages does NOT make up for the search feature being taken away in my opinion.

Alex, are you seriously suggesting that users should stop using the board efficiently and purposely as opposed to... oh, say... the board owners stick some of the revenue back into it and get everything working properly?

I mean seriously... if one of my clients came to me and said that their servers cannot handle the load they are getting and I told them "cut traffic"... what kind of response what I get? A big "fuck you”.

finding people and their icq #. Finding threads about certain keywords. Lots of stuff really

Tons of stuff. GFY's search feature is one of the most useful resources in the adult biz.

You can research people, a program's payment history, find ultra niche sponsors, hot new sales techniques... all kinds of stuff.

The thing about this board is that lots of relevant and important stuff gets discussed, but those threads drop like rocks among all the other bullshit... so you have to use the search feature to find it.

The sponsor in my sig has a great referral stats system. I have been amazed at how many referrals I have gotten from threads found via very specific search strings on GFY's search using business based keywords.

Jim, I am on a fairly high speed (6mps) connection, and mondya to friday, from about 10am est until about 7 pm at night, the board is just as likely to timeout as it is to load, and just as likely to drop as a post as add it. Often, I am looking at page load times in the range of 1 to 2 minutes. Useless.

Sly, with 700,000 threads and over 13,000,000 posts, the amount of resources required to allow people to search the entire post database is pretty high. Being that it is DB intensive, that is a very heavy load even for a larger cluster of servers. I don't think that vbulletin was created to handle that sort of volume of posts and users.

I don't say "don't use the board as you see productive", but I don't think that the board software or database layout really can scale up to the points you expect it to.

Pornwolf, all the things you list are valid searches, but I can't see anyone making 20 or 30 of those searches a day. I might do one of those searches every few days, but the again, I visit the board a few times a day between things I am working on, so I tend to see more of what is on page 1.

Perhaps more the issue is people making moronic posts and 101 "would you hit it" posts that crowd up page 1. Maybe a section for contests and a section for "would you hit it" would allow people to keep up more, no?

You have a problematic internet connection it sounds like Alex. Maybe a local network issue? The board shouldn't be crippled to accommodate the few people that have issues with their internet connection. How come I have rarely had a timeout to a post except during the culmination to a contest when people are posting like mad? The search is just too useful to dismiss.

It would be nice if they could find a way to bring back search.

1. find threads where people have mentioned my name, my company, my services.

2. find threads I started or participated in

3. find threads where someone mentioned a tool that I can't remember the URL of

just a sample of the searches I might do

I use it to search mainly.. but sometimes I just like to click it for fun. I really miss that button

:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh

I used it to slow down the site as much as possible.

LOL yeah OP's question is a bit tarded...as if people were using it to find Christmas Cookie recipes.

you're confusing server related timeouts with network related problems... mr webmaster

I used to think you are a smart guy. :)

Jim, my internet connection is just fine, thanks. Ping and trace to GFY are normal ( <100ms all the time, not bad considering 75ms is lost going east to west on Level3). No other website exhibits this behavior. Further, the server does connect and accept the connection, it is just unable at times to provide back content within the timeout period.

Funny enough, if you had search, you could look for how many times people have said "this place is as slow as shit" or similar. Then again, you could just google it:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&c...ow&btnG=Search

Remember too, your browser has a "find" feature on it that will let you check the current page thread titles. Then again, someone experienced on the internet would know these things, right Jim?

A one page at a time CTRL-F "find" function in your local browser is very limited feature that does not approach anywhere near the utility of a real board search function.

A know that a lot of people have said that the forum is slow at times. I believe them that the pages time out for them. It has happened to me once in a while. But it does not impact the usefulness of the board most days and most times for myself and many others. GFY is pretty responsive for me most of the time and rarely times out considering how big the forum is and how many users there are.

If it times out for you and not for others on a regular basis that means by definition that the problem is on your end, despite your ping test. I imagine that it is frustrating, but there is probably a way to fix it to improve your browser's performance. We still need a search function though!

Jim, seriously, stick with video editing, because you are pretty much failing on network and server operations. have you not noticed all the double posts, the lost posts, the threads that get "hijacked" because the original post never actually gets posted? That is database / network / server style issues that have nothing to do with anyone's connection to the internet or ISP. The proof is in the pudding, almost everyone here is saying that the board is much faster without the search running.

The question still stands. I can understand you or anyone else coming in and making maybe 1 or 2 searches a day. But there is nowhere near enough normal searches to slow the board down. That would suggest that either people are coming here and searching for their names and program names every hour of every day, are using search to find replies because they can't remember what threads they are posting in, or because people are running abusive bots that are searching all day and all night for stuff.

I know and understand the normal uses of search, but apparently it must be getting abused rather heavily for the mods to feel it would be better to turn it off.

give it up man - if you dont know then dont worry about it :winkwink:

pap, how about you explain it to me then? I have been doing chat boards and such for almost 30 years. I have never been in a position where I need to use a search function 20 or 30 times a day. I would really like to know why it is getting hit so hard.

I use it to followup my own posts/replies without having to search through tons of pages.

Also I search for the names of sponsors I use to keepup with news relating to them.

Finally. A valid use. I guess in a way it says that sponsors don't do a good job communicating with their affiliates. Perhaps we need a "program news" board here, so that programs could better explain themselves to people and keep things current?

Well, I don't know if i'd say its because they don't communicate well with their affiliates. Sometimes they'll post new promo tools, contests, bonuses, etc and honstly i'd rather find it by searching GFY then getting tons of emails about every little change.

Also a sponsor will never say "Hey affiliates, check our our zango drama on GFY". For example I dropped AFF after searching for the latest news about them here and seeing the zango/torrent crap.

Jim you must have a magic connection lol because it times out on me and can be as slow as when I was on a 56k modem.The increase in speed since the search has been disabled is amazing.

Google search the shit

It's all in your mind Tony. The board is sizzling fast all the time, just the rest of the internet totally sucks all the time.

HAHAHAHA:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1 orglaugh

As someone stated earlier, I used to think you were one of the smart ones here.

Heck Alex.. whats a search feature : )

Why don't they post up a google site search box in the interim while they work out the kinks?

Search WAS scroll down the page until you find your name and work backwards.

People are too worried what everyone says about them these days.

Why would I waste my time scrolling through pages when i could search?

I think I've searched for my name once on GFY in almost 6 years.


Who does that regularly?

I have found it useful for looking for those - 'spam me with sponsors that have webcam rss feeds' and stuff like that. 20 to 30 times a day - no way. Once or twice sure. I was just looking at www.big-boards.com and there are plenty of bigger boards that still have the search feature active It's got to be some sort of bot problem I imagine.