[BoardTracker]

Originally Posted by ferrarislave

Boardtracker, I run a single board, I want to signup for your service; however, I don't see how I can benefit from the mod seeing that vbulletin already does a great job of finding things that our members look for... Sorry to sound ignorant, or otherwise mis-informed, but I don't quite understand the need for this mod if your running a single forum.

Hi ferrarislave
First of all, glad to see you submitted your board into BoardTracker and will soon enjoy being searchable on BoardTracker and found by users of BoardTracker even if you don't use the search mod.

As for the search mod..
Your board has 3300 threads. At that size, the internal search mechanism can still handle that without significant impact on the speed/responsiveness of the board.
However, as your board grows, you will see it getting slower and slower, since the internal search mechanism is not well designed for search, a thing which causes heavy load on the Database server/s and eventually similar or even higher loads on the web servers, which is why you will see many board with search disabled. By the way, this is not VB specific issue. All board software suffer from this. A proper search requires a system built from the ground up to do search and that is what BoardTracker does and even more specifically it is designed and built for searching boards.

And at the same time, the results will start being less relevant, for the same reason - The built in search is not fully suitable for searching in large quantities of data/text.

When you get to that stage, you will most probably see the need for a better search. BoardTracker search mod can answer that need.

To see the performance problem issue and some of it's roots, have a look at https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=119263

To see the relevancy problem itself, try this..
Search this board for -< searching large forums >- and order it by relevancy. Do you find the above thread at all? (note: it's titled "How did you solve searching in large forums?").
Now try searching BoardTracker for the same thing: searching large forums
Notice that even without a site limit, the relevant thread comes up among the very first results:
searching large forums
What's more, BoardTracker allows you to use stemming. that means that even if you search for search large forum instead of searching large forums, it will still find the thread.

You can judge the mod maybe by seeing boards.ie's experience, rpg.net's and others. Hopefully we will see some feedback from BimmerForums.com soon if they disable the advanced search and see the full effect of migrating to the search mod on their servers.

I hope it clears things up. Let us know what you think.