The search box on www.freebsd.org..

[Murray Stokely]

On 5/10/07, Wolfram Schneider <wosch at freebsd.org> 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.
>
> > 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.

This can be addressed with sitemaps [1].  Y! claims ~5 million indexed
freebsd.org pages.  Do we know how many documents are in our home
grown search corpus?

I think we should switch the search bar to using google or Y!, just as
NetBSD does.

         - Murray

[1] http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/