[mso] Freelists needs your input on the new archive indexing program

 
Hi group.  Below is an email I got from John Madden who owns freelists
(which hosts this group for free and is an excellent service).  Anyway, if
any of you actually use our archives to search for answers to your problems,
I would like you to try them now and see if you see increased speed and
performance, or if you see any problems.  I will send your comments to John
Madden so he knows how it's going.

If you have comments for John, please send them to me offlist at
linda@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Thanks.

Linda
Linda's Computer Stop
http://personal-computer-tutor.com
ABC Free Ezine ~ Free Ebooks and Tutorials
*all outgoing mail scanned by Norton AV.  If you got a bug that looks like
it came from me, it did NOT!

-----Original Message-----

Hello FreeLists list owners, it's certainly been awhile, hasn't it?  No news

is good news, right?

After years of using ht://Dig to maintain the search indexes for your 
archives, we've decided to move to a new product called Swish-e.  The
reasons 
for this are many: 

- It's slow: indexing an archive (that is, building the search engine's 
databases) took too long.  As FreeLists has grown, the window of time needed

to index everyone's archive went from "overnight, everynight" to "let it run

all weekend" to "start it Friday night and it might be done by Wednesday."  
Obviously, this is not a scalable solution. :)
- Its indexes take a lot of disk space relative to other products.  Not that

it's a particularly unmanageable amount of disk space in general, but 
searching those large indexes obviously takes longer than searching smaller 
ones.
- It's buggy: The last straw came last week when one of our list owners 
pointed us to a broken index for an archive that htdig apparently simply 
couldn't index correctly anymore.  'No excuse for that...
- It appears to not be actively developed: The version we were running was 
released in 2002, which is in and of itself a bad sign.  Worse, the new 
'beta' releases run many times more slowly than the version we're running --

we can't take steps backward.  

Swish-e appears to address all of these issues for us.  Its performance is 
excellent, its indexes are small yet effective, it provides us with more 
granular configuration, and as an added bonus, provides us with a nice
search 
API, around which we've built our own search setup, rather than relying on 
what ships with the product. 

The new search engines are already in place and operational, so feel free to

test yours out.  We're currenlty running a full re-index to catch any we may

have missed.  If you run into problems with your archive's search engine, 
please let us know.

Thanks,
  John


PS: Sneak preview: Stay tuned for some exciting news early next month!


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