Beta Search Can you help us test our new BETA search…

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Friday, 09 January 2004

Beta Search

Can you help us test our new BETA search engine? (« just click that link and try a search)

Monsur just got it up and running (woo hoo), but we're still working on it... it turns out that providing real-time search of almost 55 million blog posts is really hard. We're feverishly working to get something out there though, as we miss search so.

For our beta launch of search, we've indexed about half of the users on the site, with all of their posts as of late December. It's not as current or complete as we hoped. But while we make it so, we're hoping that you can try it out and let us know a couple of things?
- What do you think of the search?
- Any suggestions for changes before we go live with this?
- What is the first thing you searched for... and what did you find?
Check out our beta search here: http://beta.xanga.com. Thanks!

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Comments (39)

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Yay. That's all I can say.

And, I'm pleased with the beta sample searches that I did.
- 1/9/2004 5:16 PM
- soNOTcool (message)
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impressive! Fast!
- 1/9/2004 5:23 PM
- VeryModern (message)
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I can understand the sponsored results when doing a *Web* search, but why are they in the internal *Xanga* search results? It certainly does not enhance the usefulness of the internal search results.

How often will the index be rebuilt?

What happens if I change the public/private status of an entry between indexes? Will the public be able to see a snippet of my newly private thoughts??

But... ANY search is better than no search at all.
- 1/9/2004 5:53 PM
- sean (message)
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oh... and I searched for "flower".
- 1/9/2004 5:54 PM
- sean (message)
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About time you got that thing running. :D Me like very much. Now I can stalk people easier... puwahahah... I was kidding. No, really, I'm kidding. Honestly, I am! - Mike
- 1/9/2004 6:43 PM
- mssn_head (message)
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wow... nice search engine! good job...
- 1/9/2004 7:14 PM
- pinayprincezz (message)
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dont need it unless ur searching for another user or sumthin.I use google for seaching stuff.
- 1/9/2004 7:42 PM
- skeboking (message)
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searching through Xanga for a blog relevant to some topic...now that's a novel idea! i like it! at least now the user search yields results in alphabetical order instead of last-updated! i like that.
- 1/9/2004 8:04 PM
- booyahman (message)
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1st & 2nd search: "Cold Mountain" on Xanga, then on Web. got some people's blogs mentioning Cold Mountain, then found links in the internet on Cold Mountain, novel, movie, the actual mountain, etc.
3rd and 4th search: searched for a person's first name, but i only got usernames, in alphabetical order. searched for a partial username, and came up with full usernames, in alphabetical order. alphabetical order is nice. could you add searching by real names of those people who list their names publicly on xanga?
- 1/9/2004 8:09 PM
- booyahman (message)
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i searched for my name, camry (yes, i am an egomanical freak....), and i got lots of car references. no surprise, since i was named after the car. really.
- 1/9/2004 8:18 PM
- carsoap (message)
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finally! it looks great! when when when is it going into production!?!?!?

have a great weekend and thanks for making great progress!!!
- 1/9/2004 8:21 PM
- sean808080 (message)
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Looking pretty good! It's pretty fast. Oh, and I searched for "Cuzco, Peru".
- 1/9/2004 9:02 PM
- gryffyn (message)
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Nice to hear some news on site updates. It seems like it's been a while (no offense).
- 1/9/2004 10:03 PM
- Sportsgod (message)
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I like it;I think it works good.It's fast too so thats a plus!
- 1/9/2004 10:39 PM
- starxchild (message)
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job well done!
- 1/10/2004 12:27 AM
- LaMbiNO (message)
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I love it! I was wondering when we would be able to do something like that! =)
- 1/10/2004 12:30 AM
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I'll probably get a good butt-chewin' for this one (since most of the work is done...) but I would kill the xanga search option... If people are interested, have 'em work with Google to put a search bar on their site.

Um... anyway...

In trying out the search function, you might want to remind people to choose "Show search bar" in the Change Look and Feel options. It took me a second to wonder where I was supposed to search.

I searched usernames for Namaste, and that seemed to work fine. Then, I searched Xanga for Galveston, and was bemused by the results... I was suprised to find more people have mentioned my little island than I was aware of... yet, the people I know who have mentioned it did not show up (not that big a suprise, since you only did half of Xanga).

Only one of my entries made it, and I'm sure I have mentioned Galveston more than once... On the other hand, I have a "robots.txt" file, asking my page not to be searched at all... I would prefer if the Xanga search option didn't work on my site either. (Think of it as similar to protected posting... I don't mind people getting to my site, but I don't want them to be able to do it through a search engine). Is/will there be an option to opt out of Xanga search?
- 1/10/2004 12:40 AM
- namaste (message)
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looks like it works fine to me and fast!
- 1/10/2004 12:56 AM
- liviatasia (message)
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good ... simple
- 1/10/2004 1:43 AM
- jacckkoiz (message)
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Looks good... much better than what we had before! I just have a couple requests that I know some other Xangans can back me up on... for future betas, look into adding some kind of "adv. search" where you can search the name "josh" instead of "josh" in the username. For instance, my xanga handle is TuckerViolinist -- well, some of my friends have been trying to find me here on Xanga and tried searching my first name "Elizabeth" or "Kansas" (my home state). In the future, it would be very usefull for an adv. search that would search: first/last name, "city/state", schools/universities, etc. Let me know if you have plans to do this!
- 1/10/2004 3:49 AM
- TuckerViolinist (message)
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i think its great
- 1/10/2004 6:23 AM
- platformnubz (message)
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Are there going to be any 'advanced' search techniques to, say, search for a particular word or phrase on a specific user's site?

Or, say that I want to find out if anyone is talking about me--can I search for 'notforprophet' and get returns from all others' text without getting the returns from my own attributing blog url lines (which is what it happening now)?
- 1/10/2004 7:36 AM
- notforprophet (message)
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its great!
- 1/10/2004 10:49 AM
- Justin_Hirsch (message)
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"Xanga search is a premium feature - it uses a lot of Xanga's server power, so it's really expensive for us to run. We hope to be able to offer it to everyone someday, but right now we can support it only for Xanga Premium members.

But Web search is free for anyone - Web search results are provided by a partner, so it's much less expensive for us to run, and we can provide it to everyone . Just click the tab above to try Web search."

Thumbs down.
- 1/10/2004 11:37 AM
- ntg (message)
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wow its great!!! i like it alot.. but you should put it on your main page somewhere.. mabe you can add somethign like.. user name or phrase just saying.. its great tho
- 1/10/2004 1:07 PM
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