intertwingly

Simon Fell: Hey Sam do you know your search widget is broken?

A little insight into the inner workings of this website.  I allow a variety of query mechanisms to narrow in on a specific set of items.  Example.

To do the full text indexing, I use swish++.  It is fast and stores all of its index in a single file.

Compiled in limits on word sizes to index are four characters for non-acronyms, and three for acronyms.

A while ago, I had a problem whereby a crawler was generating a lot of files in my cache, so I "fixed it" so that when zero results were returned, I returned a 404 instead.

To make it easier to find acronyms, I've now made a small tweak, namely to uppercase the query.