To purchase ES add-on or push users to use the Google search ability

[Tracy]

That is the question. We ALL know that mySQL search sucks salty balls and you need to be able to use something like ES or Sphinx (back in the "bad old" IPS days).
I use an add-on that adds Google search to my site, but it's not the "default" search option, you have to go to the advanced search.... but when you do, it DOES return a lot of results specific to the site.

The add-on I use (from OzzModz) does "fall back" to using Google for the search if using the built in search if you have the "Try anyways" mode checked and nothing is found... but I'm trying to decide if I would be better served in the long run by installing ES and adding the 1st party add-on for it since many of the targeted search terms will be 2-3 letters in length when dealing with Messier objects.

 

[Arantor]

The downside to using Google is that it's only going to index the things that are publicly visible, which for *your* use case is fine, but it's honestly not for all use-cases, not even close. Plenty of times I've needed to search in non-public (but not necessarily *super* restricted) areas on forums.

Thing is I'm not entirely sure why MySQL's search is so poor; it's come a long way since it was introduced in the heady early days of 4.0 and the way the index is constructed in XF in particular is pretty good about getting in metadata and so on. I will have to look into ES some time to see specifically what XF are doing with ES that makes it perform that much better, at a guess I'd assume it's stemming related. And I imagine ES's tokeniser is smarter, but the other thing is that hosts usually have rubbish FTS config on MySQL

 

[Tracy]

The downside to using Google is that it's only going to index the things that are publicly visible, which for *your* use case is fine, but it's honestly not for all use-cases, not even close. Plenty of times I've needed to search in non-public (but not necessarily *super* restricted) areas on forums.

Yeah...that's why I was interested in ES.... with my site, the only areas that are not indexed are the announcements, comments and the "I'm banned" nodes.
But for those that have "firewalled" off nodes for certain groups, it's kind of a "have to"....
For me, the major concern is the fact there are a LOT of 2-3 letter acronyms in the field.... the Google search add-on returns them, but it's in the "google page" format. ES will return those in the standard XF format... but I have found that even with ES, the forum search function is not the best.

 

[Arantor]

Easy, throw a few million servers at it and two decades of historical data running into the exabytes and you'll be grand.

 

[Tracy]

Easy, throw a few million servers at it and two decades of historical data running into the exabytes and you'll be grand.

For my site... already do that with the Google search add-on...

We aren't talking internet wide search... but site specific search, which doesn't require anywhere near what you relate. At least with ES you aren't restricted by the stop words of mySQL base search and you don't have to tweak your mySQL settings to search for less than 4 letter searching.

 

[Arantor]

How do you think Google makes site specific search work better? By drawing on the vast other data it has - which your site doesn't otherwise provide.

 

[Tracy]

By drawing on the vast other data it has - which your site doesn't otherwise provide.

No, it makes those specific search terms based upon what MY site offers..... not what Cloudy Nights does, or Stargazers Lounge or anywhere else. They are based upon terms specific to it.
.
It's no different than going to Google and searching directly for that site... it cares not about any other site, only what it has indexed on that site that you are searching.

 

[Tracy]

Easy, throw a few million servers at it and two decades of historical data running into the exabytes and you'll be grand.

Or even easier... set up the ES RPM repository, install it, spend about 30 minutes configuring and grab the ES add-on for XF and you're grand (and fast) for 3 letter search terms.

And 2 letter also!

On my 8GB vps, I'm throwing 3GB of RAM aside for ES to use.