The search box on www.freebsd.org..

[John Baldwin]

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.

> > 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).
> 
> you know how few pages are indexed by google? Usually less than 10-50%
> of a web site.

Searching for "freebsd logo" on both Google and Y! broght up logo.html as the 
first result.

-- 
John Baldwin