E2 Full Text Search, and how to use it
You can easily search through the nodespace to find any string that you want. In this document, I am going to try to answer some of your questions regarding full-text search, and what good and bad practices of it are. Some of this stuff you know already from using search engines across the Internet, and some things you're gonna have to be nice about. It is located in your Vitals nodelet. Let's start with the basics:
Will this replace the titles search?
NO! For two reasons... First, full text search is largely more expensive than title searching. Secondly, you do not leave softlinks if you full text search from a node that you are on. This is for researching topics, looking to fill in places, or even doing research for your own benefit. If you think you can accomplish something by titles search, please do. But if you want to find that node where that girl said that thing about the whatchamacalit, then this is the tool for you.
How do I search for something
Just type something in and go. The results will be returned to you with a preview of the node. You get ten at a time to pick through. The search may be a little slow. There are 19 million entries that we have to look through so be patient. The more words you search for, the longer it is going to take.
What is weight?
Weight is roughly the count of words that matched your query, between the title and the body. By default, we order them by weight. We only index writeups, so things like the Everything FAQ, which are superdocs, cannot be found in this manner. Just like people loading up crap pages with keywords, things can score higher than they actually should. This is life. Know what to search for.
How do I search by phrase, any keyword, and all keywords
The short answer here is that you can't. You can only search by ALL words in the list. It is a very dumb search engine in that respect. We had to take some design limitations because we don't have any sort of binary code module to do this for us. This is raw DB and sweat, baby. With a database this big (or one even bigger, such as Google), pick good search words to come up with relevant information, just as you would with any database. Uncommon words are better, as they will more uniquely come up with what you are looking for. "Any" and "all" will be added in later. Phrase is likely never to be offered, unless a bolt of clever strikes us.
Why did it tell me that it won't search for a word
Just like our good friend Google, we would be somewhere near "dreams in John Tesh tunes" insane if we were to index articles. To get the curiosity out of your system, the most common article is "the", then followed by "a". The top 1% of all words are forbidden from being searched for. This is mainly because they are all either too general to find something with (book, sex, definition) or conversational devices (and, or, nor, but, fuck), etc. Choose words carefully when searching, and save yourself lots of time. We'll eventually publish a list of these words to help you along.
Why are some searches much faster than others
We have a little magic that tucks away things that were already searched for. Eventually we'll expand this functionality to be done ahead of time, but if you search for something more than once, it's free. So it's really okay if you click the "Next 10" links along the bottom of the page, those are free.
Will my writeup get indexed if I change it
Writeups get indexed every evening at some miscellaneous time, until they are done. If you change it, your writeup silently gets marked for re-indexing. It will be recycled into the queue of indexing at that point and done later. Likewise if you submit a new writeup, it will appear in the full text search a day later. It needs to settle to find its place overnight.