Announcing Enhanced Usenet Search Engine at Mac GUI

[D Finnigan <dog_cow@macgui.com>]

Mac GUI Vault has had a Usenet archive since day 1 (in fact, it was online
before Vault officially opened) but the search facilities were limited: the
main limitation was that you couldn't search across newsgroups.

I'm now glad to announce that there is an enhanced Usenet search engine that
far surpasses the old one. It searches all groups, it does exact phrase
matches, it does subject and author matches, it does word stemming, and all
the other tricks that we are used to having from using Google to search. It
even has a word frequency ranking system that does a decent job, I think.

The search index is not complete; as we speak, the system is indexing all
1.4 million posts in the background. However, all of the main
comp.sys.apple2.* groups are in the index. And after a week or so, you will
be able to search all Apple II posts back to the early 1980s, including
posts from comp.binaries.apple2 that exist only on Mac GUI.

There are just a few limitations at the moment. Some of these are described
in the search tutorial which is a followup to this article. The second
limitation is speed. Unfortunately I don't have a cluster of machines to
make a distributed search engine. Therefore, I did the best that I can. If a
particular search term is too common, it will bring too many results and
take a long time to load the results page. You will typically get a 404
error. If you really want to see the results, wait a few moments, then
refresh the page. I have a few ideas about improving speed which I hopefully
will implement later. Also, there are no word synonyms. I will add this
feature soon.

If you have any suggestions at all, such as for how to better rank results,
or a query that gives wrong results, or anything else, please let me know so
I can improve the search engine.

Try it out at:

http://macgui.com/usenet/

Advanced search form:

http://macgui.com/usenet/search.php

Again, look over the followup to this article to see what search queries are
possible with this new search engine!

-- 
]DF$
Apple II Book: http://macgui.com/newa2guide/
Mac GUI Vault: http://macgui.com/vault/
Usenet Archive: http://macgui.com/usenet/