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Improving Mindat.orgpleasant brunswick

12th Mar 2006 17:19 UTCP. Michael Hutchins

That Location Search finds nothing..

..and yet, that Google search for site:mindat returns a whole wealth of stuff.

12th Mar 2006 18:30 UTCDavid Von Bargen Manager

Yes, that's sort of the way the search works here. It looks for the exact string that you put in the search box ie the equivalent Google search with quotes around the terms. You are better off searching for either Pleasant alone or new brunswick if you want all of the localities in New Brunswick. The google site search also looks at the description field of the localities.

See manual on locality search:

http://manual.mindat.org/index.php/Locality_Search

14th Mar 2006 00:28 UTCP. Michael Hutchins

Thank you; I did not know that.

(that Mindat Location searches are string/substring searches, even across word boundaries)

a few points:

o The manual page you pointed me to doesn't mention anything about this ;

it would be nice if it did.

(Would Mindat like it if I went & edited the manual page for this? I'm not used to such being OK, & don't know the culture.)

(I see that it's possible, but...)

(curmudgeon alert!)

o obviously, the mindat location search would be better if it worked like I

thought it did

(not that that would be trivial to achieve)

o & obviously, a quoted Google search works like Mindat's Location search only

if complete words are used

(ieg: "ew brun" finds New Brunswick on Mindat, but of course wouldn't on

Google)

-- M.

14th Mar 2006 11:30 UTCDavid Von Bargen Manager

Actually if you had tried, you would have seen that editting the manual isn't possible. We had some problems with spammers posting to the manual wiki and it is now set up to require login and you can't register. The culture on the site is pretty open about people correcting/expanding things. I've added a few lines to the manual about this search.

Achieving a search like you want is not a particularly trivial exercise in programming if you keep it fairly generalized (at least to make it fairly efficient). The Google site search is a fairly decent compromise to have a generalised search of the site. They do index the new information on this site on a regular basis. The downside is that they do not display the hierarchy of the locations in the search results.

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