Don't Waste Time on Fedora Mailing List Archive Searches - Search Engine Broken

[Mark Weaver]

M. Fioretti wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 13, 2005 09:37:08 AM -0500, Mark Weaver
> (mdw1982 at mdw1982.com) wrote:
> 
>>heh! obviously they're not using Swish-e, or if they are its
>>definitely not indexing the archives correctly.
>>
> 
> 
> Of course, the fact that you and David (**) keep bloating the
> archives, posting and posting again the same whole message just to add
> two or three lines every time, doesn't help the indexer, does it?
> 
> Ciao,
> 	Marco
> 
> (**) like many other posters do in other threads, of course. This was
> just funnier because its subject is exactly the inability of the
> archives to provide useful results with simple searches...
> 

actually, its been my experience and also my personal opinion that to 
include rather than trim previous bits from previous posts adds more 
weight and makes things easier to find with "good" search utilities 
simply by virtue of the fact that there are simply "more" keywords to 
search on. This one fact makes it more likely that the search-er will 
find what they're looking for.

The only argument I've ever heard to the contrary are those made by 
folks who simply don't "want" the added text in the followup post and 
attempt to disguise this by saying it makes things harder to find. 
_That_ is a personal preference on the part of the arguer and not 
beneficial in any way to indexes or searchers. That doesn't mean your 
reasons aren't valid, it just means they're your reasons and actually 
germain to the subject.

Also, including previous posts as part of the response post makes it far 
easier to follow the context of the thread all in one place as long as 
care is taken not to go any deeper than 4-5 posts; after that, I 
believe, the benefit rapidly diminishes.

Apart from all that I think you're just being grumpy! ;)

-- 
Mark
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