Primer Archives Beast

From Wiki Gonzalez

Q. What is the Primer Archives Beast and what does it have to do with search?

A. It's a beastie included with Expression Engine that periodically killed and ate the archives of Baseball Think Factory, making it impossible to search for anything on the site.

On November 15, 2005, Jim Furtado added a custom Google site-search to BBTF, to answer many complaints about archives searching. Simple searching (available near the top of every page) was pretty effective for most purposes, and the only thing the Beast was used for was "advanced" searching via the archives search (http://www.baseballthinkfactory.org/files/search/) page. Sometime in late 2007, this Advanced Search feature was removed once and for all, leaving Google as the sole search option for BBTF. The Beast had been slain.

If a link from Google doesn't work, try the link conversion advice in the Upgrades entry.

Using plain Google may be the best way to go. Add the tag "site:baseballthinkfactory.org" to the search box along with your search terms. With this method, you have access to Google's cached version of the page, in addition to the live one.

In contrast to the rest of BBTF, the forums have a custom search page that, while slow, does effectively locate search terms for you, and even shows excerpts from the original forum post.

Contrary to popular belief, the archives search did work. The important part was to remember to select "search in titles, entries, and comments" rather than the default "search in titles and entries". (Still, in many cases the results remained rather underwhelming.) Another hint was to select "Any Blog", even if you knew exactly which weblog you wished to search.

The "advanced" search results unfortunately gave no indication of what post contained the desired content. Once the desired thread was found, the user still had to manually search through page after slow-loading page.