Yes, the search index has been "stuck" (yet again
) as of
27 Feb 2008, 13:xx EST. Search results do not include anything posted after the said date/time.
To test search index, you can use the following link and select [Sort by Post Date]:
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/searc...+Now&query=you
02/27/2008 04:41:39 (CST). According to the beta search, that's the last post I made. I actually have a couple of more since then but none was showing up.
Being non-techie, I really don't understand how a search improvement would cause so many "unexpected" issues.
Yes, it's true our traditional, classic search can't do 3-letter search. It had worked quite well for me, with a little boost from Google sometimes.
I liked the format. It generally gave me a good enough hit from the search result. I even got to see posts from just minutes ago.
As for the beta IB search, yes, that's nice now I can do 3-letter search, which I don't do that often anyway. Yes, it will even show me posts from ages ago (2-3 or even 4-year), which I couldn't in the classic search but I hardly had to dig up threads from that age.
Meanwhile, I also get to see the phantom pages/posts that were deleted and (supposedly) invisible from the general members. Even with an added data server, the search index will be unannouncedly out of sync, so we don't get to see those recently-made posts. The format/layout doesn't tell me straightforwardly if new posts are made to the threads I am following. We need to do the workaround-subscription-folder trick in order to get the result we can really enjoy.
Most of all, the general FT public don't get advanced notice at all, as far as the IB technology improvement goes. If enough folks complained, we may get a response from
Kevin. It had happened at least three times this year that FT was unbearably slow, just out of the blue. We didn't know if that's a scheduled maintenance issue or what.
It seems to me there was never a schedule to perform whatever fixes, big or small, IB needed to do.
As far as the technology goes, IB is not effectively communicating to FTers. Most of the times, I feel ignored when reporting technical issues. Maybe the issues I ran into were not significantly enough.
However, if the problems we are reporting seem to be ongoing, don't we at least get some say monthly progress updates? Is this too much to ask?