h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

People put punctuation in search strings?

Search for Jim Lynn, and ye shall find, search for Jim -Lynn and he's gone.

Searching for hyphenated words, bad idea. Eh +Jim +Lynn

...but +Jim +Lynn does not work!

Many searches take each word to be looked for as +word +word so you are not searching for a string, just that all the words happen to be in that sring you just searched for.

The space is suppost to mean +word and an + sign to be ignored. I would even expect searching for Lynn +Jim to work.

The search provided with h2g2 is bobbins! The 'proper' BBC search is goo, why not just use that, with a section header like the other parts of BBCi (bbc.co.uk) ?

Traveller in Time on the financial news
"Then the HooToo( +collective +ww2 ) site has to pay the BBC for the use of their search service.

As far as I see all non alphabetic characters are ignored in the search query, that is, they are seperating the words but even quoted do not take part of the phrase."

Jab, try searches involving the "h2g2 Programmers' Corner" (without the outside quotes) to see what I mean. From my experiments, I'm guessing that the input field for the search box escapes out the ' character, thus submitting "h2g2 programmer\'s corner" as the search string, which is a less close match than "h2g2 programmers corner".

Oops, "h2g2 programmers\' corner"

Yup, not good. Best if search strings are AND &5F and are reformed from characters excluding those below &41 or above &90; before being looked for.

Then again best not to post when one has been on the fizzy pop. ""

It doesn't really matter how you munge the search strings as long as the indexing spider munges the index strings in the same way...

Peet, yes index and search sting semblence is required.

"Munged." Munge is a slang word for money I thought?

http://wombat.doc.ic.ac.uk/foldoc/foldoc.cgi?query=munge&action=Search

Better, http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/M/munge.html

(I was using meaning 3...)

Traveller wrote:

>> "Then the HooToo( +collective +ww2 ) site has to pay the BBC for the use of their search service. <<


Nonsense that, my friend.

We have the technology to add anything we like to the BBC Search engine. Only thing we don't have is time or people to do it. We're hoping to be able to start adding Edited h2g2 content into the BBC Search engine soon though, so you should slowing begin to see an increase in h2g2-related results there.

Traveller in Time on the cripled BBC search (in the old days the search started searching the web, now we have two search boxes for searching the BBC)
"Oh, if you say so.
< <./>F77636?thread=401840&skip=83&show=8</.> >
I got the messgae slightly different.

Oh and a retry:
< <./>//www.bbc.co.uk/nature</.> > (finally right)"

Hi Traveller,

The cost of search, as mentioned by Jim Lynn, isn't an internal cost from one department to another; the listings & search department, as Jim Sangster says, don't recharge h2g2 or any of the DNA communities for using BBC Search.

However, the BBC pays an external company to populate the BBC search, so adding every single thing in h2g2 to the BBC search would probably cost the BBC money, rather than h2g2 specifically.

Traveller in Time dedicated to BBC/search
*It is just the BBC search funcion always gives me the best hit on the first page.
There even is a spell checker explaining low hit counts.

NB. Until this announcement, the importance of the quality of the search was a little underestimated. In the past several researchers were creating entries based upon gaps in the search as it failed after an upgrade. *

Nephew Who tapping on another console
"I do not get it, what is this fuzzing with quotation marks anyway?"

lurking on his pipe (no smoke comes out)

It has probably to do with the search being unable to find any of these quotes. They are indexed as phrases and should be queried like
""Whatever you say"". Though I must say 'Traveller in Time' at least does use them always in the same way.