Mon, May 9, 2005
Search!—9:54 AM
Last week, the focus of my redesign shifted from the editing tools to the search feature. It looks like it will still be a while before these functionalities are finalized and made public, but when they are, searching this site will be a lot faster and more powerful.
For one thing, I've increased support for Google-style queries, specifically exclusion and exact-phrase matching. Now you can run searches like survivor -hatch to find Survivor columns and eliminate those which mention Richard Hatch. Or, "olsen twins" -erection
This, of course, led to a reevaluation of the way listings are coded. Code sensei Rushbo pointed out that it's grossly inefficient to do hit the database 21 times to display a list of search results (once for the query, 20 times to fill in the details for the first 20 hits) as I was doing with my new object-oriented approach. Silly me, I forget that just because something is stored in an object doesn't mean every attribute of that object has to be filled in. If you're just displaying title, date, and ID, you can grab that from the database as part of that first query and then you don't have to return 20 more times.
So, now I'm going back and upgrading other listings to follow the same, more efficient model. I really should've known better in the first place, but the pages were loading so fast! It's just more of the cycle already well established in this redesign: brilliant insight!, drudgery, drudgery, drudgery, brilliant insight!, ...
