So our behind-the-curtains team here at the Gawker Empire has been, well, besides basically keeping we lazy editors afloat, working hard to make sure that our websites do cool things like actually work. Brice (who I, of all editors, forgot on Sysadmin Appreciation, but will remember now) spent a long time finally building a search tool that would get the job done for Gizmodo (MT’s search, god love it, just wasn’t quite up to the task of handling of dozens to tens of dozens of requests at once), and we’ve been testing it out for the last week or so, and so far it’s working pretty great.
I just thought I’d point it out to you (it’s up there in the right hand corner), say thanks again to Brice and everybody who works so hard to make our jobs easier, and explain a little about the new search’s extended features after the jump.
Okay, I guess there’s really not a ton to say. The new search is based off of Lucerne — part of the Apache project — so most of the syntax from there should work here. By default the search presumes an ‘AND’ syntax, not an ‘OR’ syntax (it was interesting with the OR, but not so useful for the ‘make and model’ type stuff that so often show up here (e.g. “Sony Clampeon”).
And, uh, I guess that’s it (at least that I’m going to put here. If you’d like to get the down and dirty, the following docs at Apache.org should explain how to do some richer searches (and there’s so interesting stuff there, like wildcards and relevance boosting and the like, some you should check it out).
Read – Lucerne Query Parser Syntax [Apache]
