Google Searching vs Notes Searching
Talking of searching, something I've found myself doing is using Google to search Domino sites. Especially the Notes.net forums. Sounds mad but, is it just me or, is finding information in Domino really hard sometimes?
For example, take the results of a Notes FT search of this site for the term "domino errors". Two articles are returned. Neither of them anything to do with errors and no sign of these two, which would be a lot more useful.
Now, using Google, and limiting the results to those from this site, we get a result set of 216 documents. That's more like it. It even has the two more relevant articles listed in the top 5.
Google has a special syntax for searching within a specific site that looks like this:
site:www.codestore.net domino errorsSo the search term I showed you on Monday for the Google Deskbar could be changed to the following URL for better results:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.codestore.net {1}The same applies to the Notes Forums. If I go there with a problem, not only do I have to decide whether the answer is most likely in the R5 or R6 forum I also have to decide how best to phrase my search. If you use the following search URL you can cover all bases in one hit and you don't get taken literally.
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www-10.lotus.com {1}Compare the following. Searching Domino 4 and 5 Forum for "Domino errors" produces 14 results. Searching with LDD's domain search for "Domino Errors" produces 21 results. Searching LDD through Google for "Domino errors" produces 828 results.
Now I know that the number of results returned is not necessarily a measure of its quality. But, you're more likely to find what you're looking for in 200 results that in 10. Are you not?
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Because the LDD search is utter sh*te I do exactly the same thing. We even replaced the search box on our site with one that goes off to google, because the inbuilt domino engine is cr*p.
Come on,
yeah the default search is wrong but look at the search parameters and just replace the search parameters SearchWV and SearchFuzzy to TRUE and you get the good results
Sure this is not for the average user but that why we come into play.
For starters do you realy know what Google has under the hood?
I never really understood the search parameters from LDD but when you search for {"domino"&"errors"} in the Domino 4 and 5 forum you get 250 hits.
on codestore.net you get 134 hits for {"domino"&"errors"} :-)
Yeah, using the right parameters you *can* get the results you want. Sometimes it's as easy as turning on FuzzySearch or splitting all terms with the " and " operator. However, even then it's a case of having to second-guess what order to place your search terms.
In short, google just makes more sense to me. I just type in the list of words I think are important and leave it to it. With Domino I have to carefully construct the search terms over and over before I get what I want.
It's not a bug, it's a feature. Perhaps the most errors are fixed. (-:
You are right, but personally I would not want to rely on a foreign search mechanism for my own site. Maybe you put a little script behind your searchbar which parses single words into a construct which Notes can use.
(Maybe I suffer a bit from a BigBrother paranoia :-)
I'm not suggesting using Google as the main search on a website. Codestore's search engine will remain as is. As it's aimed at developers I will assume they know how to constuct a search query and take it literally.
What I am suggesting is using Google as an alternative. With the deskbar it's easy to setup a one-click search function to search the whole of this site or LDD for something...
wel i'm trying to build a list of them at the followign address. the more input the better!
{Link}
well, one of the problems i have found with the google search is that the older get replaced by the newer ones in search results. to give an example i search a discussion forum using google and some of the older documents are not found at all in the result set. however when i use the in-house search, i get those results.
i would rather use the 'domino' and 'errors', which will surely get me all results i need than to trust google to keep up cache for each and every entry in a huge discussion forum.
( i might change my mind in future, but right now, i have more confidence in the notes full text search )
Was just clicking the link to the Google search supposed to produce results? Because this is what I got:
"Your search - site:www.codestore.net domino errors - did not match any documents.
Suggestions:
- Make sure all words are spelled correctly.
- Try different keywords.
- Try more general keywords.
- Try fewer keywords.
Also, you can try Google Answers for expert help with your search."
Don't get me wrong here... but wouldn't it make more sense to, instead, write keywords and descriptions as part of your "documents", therefor taking advantage of the full-text index etc.
Thoughts?
Before I was outsourced, I used to work for a company with Autonomy software. This was an all singing all dancing site aggregator, which spidered information into a Dynamic Reasoning Engine, but you probably don't want to hear about that.
It did however have different configurable spiders, one to spider html sites (and it'd have a go at domino web sites) but it also had a notes spider, which you could configure to look at specific fields with different weights. We were well on the way to producing a notes based application for web deployment which would use context related searching within a/some notes database(s). Sadly they pulled the plug when they outsourced us, but it was shaping up to be one of the best things I ever worked on.
You can see the sort of thing we were aiming for here (sorry its flash):{Link}
Esther. No idea what you did there. You shouldn't see an empty result.
Chris. I do write keywords and descriptions of my articles.
I didn't see it in the markup...
Description and keyword tags would not only help the Notes FTI searches but also the search engines as well.
Am I seriously missing something?
Chris. Didn't realise you meant HTML meta information. You're right, there is none of that.
For searching all of notes.net one can use the Domain Search.
{Link}
Hm.
{Link}
I'll make a brief case for social responsibility, then I'll stop ranting manicly. If, as the link above and the others from yesterday, can be trusted... do we have a responsibilty to try and resist what looks like a bad trend, possibly for ourselves, down the road?
Ok... enough muck-rucking frome me... for a while...
User error.
Google does "AND" searches by default. Domino performs literal string searches by default, so it would be searching for the phrase "domino errors" which was contained in both of those documents.
Just the string domino and errors for the equivalent of a Google search.
Out of curiousity then, why not? Having the description and keywords as part of the "document" would not only boost search engine results but also results in Notes.
Jim. It wasn't an error on my part. I know how Google works and I know how Domino works. That's not the point. This was too simple an example. When things get complicated the last thing you want to do is be messing about writing this and this and this and that in to domino. It's easier to just type what you're looking for and let Google do work. This post wasn't to pick fault with Domino, it was more to show an alternative for us all.
Chris. How would it make Notes searching better adding HTML tags? Do you mean adding the values as actual document properties rather than just in to the HTML?
Sorry... I have a migrain today...
That's exactly what I mean: create a field called Description and another called Keywords. In you "build" doc simply add items into these fields. In your "display" form, set the head to grab the value from the description and keywords fields for the like tag.
Should boost searchability not only through notes but also through search engines.
Searching Domino web sites has always been a pain. On our Intranet for example, the problem is that a web page is usually built up of stuff from other pages - for example the home page document only contains the "intro" in the document, the rest of the page is built up from other documents around the site. A Domino search wouldn't find a page like this, because it'd only be searching the intro content chunk. (This is a simplistic way of explaining it).
What I ended up doing was writing a web spider that crawls the Intranet and builds a Notes database with the contents of the actual web pages. Then the Intranet search does a Domino FTSearch on this database. Works well enough. I'm quite happy with my spider, it's a sweet little multi-threaded python app that rips through all 5,000 pages on the Intranet in about 10 minutes (runs every night).
Dear Jake
Knowing how Domino FTSearch works and asuming everybody uses and likes Google, I personally prefer not to use default search options in my sites.
For instance, if you write "domino errors" in your search box, I would translate it to "[title]=(domino and errors) OR [summary]=(domino and errors)" in order to get more accurated results.
If you try to search just [title]=(domino and errors) you'll get your two most important articles on that topic.
Regards and thanks for every post. They're always useful.
Check notestips on using Google style search queries in Notes: {Link}
Jerry: I have to agree I'm seeing a bit of backlash against Google. The main reason appears to be because they are the market leader, and therefore have the power to do business as they see fit.
The site www.watchinggooglelikeahawk.com seems to be just a list of press clippings....
Remember add the term "re:" to your google query, to get the best results from the forums: the responses.