Hi Jeff,
I don't know what to say. On the one hand I appreciate the work you
all do in making the Mail Archive available, and for no charge.
On the other hand I still feel the search feature is a weak spot for
the casual user. You've illustrated the dazzling capabilities of the
new search engine, but are its features of any use to those of us who
aren't software engineers?
What I need is a search engine which is *simple* to use, which covers
*all* of an archive, and returns organized results. The previous
search engine was inadequate, IMO, but the current engine is a big
step backwards.
My brief tests with "sundial" have left me frustrated. For instance,
a search for "oglesby" used to return over 550 results, 500 of which
I could directly access. Now, I get 162 matches, can only view 100,
and they are all from many years ago. Similar results when other
active sundial list users were entered.
Maybe many of your clients need all of the bells and whistles -- I
just need something easy to use. I love the way Eudora lets me
quickly search all of the 25,000+ messages on my computer, displays
all of the results, and then lets me search results, search results,
etc. until I see what's wanted.
I really *still* would like to be able to access all of the messages
in the sundial archive by date. I guess I've figured out how to
locate the most recent 10,000, but how to get to the earliest?
Re: your FAQ -- I understand the need to keep each FAQ entry brief,
and I appreciate the links to the conversations about the new search
engine and the link to Lucene. However, some of us mere mortals won't
live long enough to decipher their instructions. My plea was for a
simple tutorial. But perhaps Lucene can't do simple things, so
there's no need for a beginner's tutorial.
Best wishes,
Mac Oglesby
P.S. If it would be of any use to this process, I'd be happy to ask
sundial list members to send me comments on their use of the new
search engine. I wouldn't expect many to bother to reply, however.
I am happy to report search is going reasonably well. The user
interface is now localized to all 16 supported languages. Today's
(weekly) update to the search index ran smoothly and the process is
much less computationally expensive than the previous system. There
have been other assorted tweaks here and there.
I don't expect too many users to ever look at the "how do I do
advanced queries" documentation. Nonetheless, I've written a draft and
am looking forward to Mac's assistance in helping make it more
understandable. http://www.mail-archive.com/faq.html#search
If you see any problems, let me know.
Thanks.
Jeff
_______________________________________________
Discussion list for The Mail Archive
Gossip@jab.org
http://jab.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gossip
_______________________________________________
Discussion list for The Mail Archive
Gossip@jab.org
http://jab.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gossip
