Thanks for the update! Is it possible to get them a little more frequently? It's especially important when the indexer has been down for almost a week.

More traffic will make it harder for the search index to keep up, wouldn't it?
Thanks for the headsup. As you know, there are more than just search problems in this thread. Good to know the FT hamsters are working on prioritizing those issues.

More importantly, any idea how soon the search index will be refreshed? I RBPed a post padder who's been doing it since 2/29/08 but none of those posts are showing up using search. I am sure mods can't perform their job due to the delay as well.

Well we appreciate all YOU do to help us here. It is great having such fast responders. This is a long shot, but any chance at simply bringing the old search format back?! pretty pleaaaaaaaaaaaassssssseeeeeee!

I believe Kevin already said "no" to that request. Our classic search is indeed history.

The IB tech team has the indexer working again, so the index should be current again. They have also added alert functionality to improve the reaction time should something go wrong with the index in the future.

I'm not the final word by a long shot, but I'd say the chances are slim and none, and slim ain't looking real healthy, if you know what I mean.

For all of its good points, the original search was creating too many problems for the performance of the site as a whole. Again, I'm not the final word, but to the best of my knowledge we reached a point where keeping the original search online would essentially lead to more system timeouts, unless and until the traffic dropped to a point where the original search could once again handle the load.

That, obviously, isn't a workable solution.

Having said all of that, it should be stressed that the new search is still a work in progress and we sincerely hope it will ultimately prove at least as useful if not more so than the original search. I realize that's difficult to envision at this point, but that's the goal.

Great feature, thanks.

Yes, I think the index is up to date. At least I am seeing those post from the post padder.

whats indexer?

This is not an update or revision of the old search, it is a complete replacement. Under the hood its a totally different animal, which means we can just plug in the old search code to add features. Everything we add needs to be reimplemented in the new framework.
Kevin

The new search doesn't work directly on the flyertalk database. Instead it works on a copy of the data that is formatted specifically for searching. By working on this copy it not only makes the searching faster, but also avoids causing contention in the main db (which is what was causing the board to become unusable). Obviously we need to keep that copy in sync with the flyertalk db and the indexer is the utility that does this. The delay should typically be a minute or two, but in this case the indexer ran into a problem and shut down. Its not a load issue. The indexer can handle substantially more than the typical rate of flyertalk (and has when we've had to reindex the entire db).
Kevin

I think it's something you need to do.

From my own personal experience, and also judging from the posts on this forum, this is the single most important use case for search on FT.

And just so I'm not a whining freeloader, I just renewed my subscription for two years.

In the specific case to which Kevin replied, Search>Advanced search>Search by username>Sort by post date (in search options) works great.

I just wish we could set search by post date as our default, or, if not that, the system default be set to that instead of relevance.

No, it doesn't - I can't tell who made the last post by looking at those results and they're sorted by the order in which I posted to the threads, rather than the order of the most recent posts on the thread.

(Bolding mine)

That's what we ALL like to see, one of the most important search feature in our classic search. Before IB can really add it in the beta search, you should try the work-around-by-subscribing solution that's been mentioned before. (Also mentioned here at post #176)

I think IB knows how important that classic search feature IS. (hint: FTers are not a quiet crowd. ). IB knows this problem and is trying to work on it (or at least they say they are. ). However, it's much harder than they expected. (Being non-techie myself, I don't know why.) I don't think they'd told us how long it would take to add this feature either.

Not trying to be pushy (maybe I am ), may I ask does IB have a timetable for this feature (i.e. sorting by the most recent posts in the threads users had posted)? (Please tell me you do and better be a short/quick one.) @:-)