The Lemon Fool

I have been getting some very incomplete results from searching TLF today. An example is that if I search for "Greene" (just using the "Search..." box at the top right of any page), I get 93 results - two posts by me today (which will of course become three as soon as I post this!) and all the rest between TLF's start in November 2016 and 10 Feb 2017. So all posts mentioning Greene King by name from 11 Feb 2017 to 28 Sep 2019 are being missed - and there are certainly plenty of them in the two threads I've posted to today alone...

My guess is that something went wrong the last time the search indices were rebuilt.

Incidentally, I originally searched for "Greene King", but the results said "ignored: king" - this does seem rather over-enthusiastic ignoring to me! Not that it matters in this case - "Greene" will come up in very few contexts on this site other than with regard to Greene King. But it would matter if I wanted to find "Green King", which is a not-uncommon misspelling of the company name, as "green" will come up in a lot of other contexts. And incidentally, as that thought prompted me to try a search for "Green King", it has a similar hole from 11 Feb 2017 to 22 Sep 2019 in its results, which may be more useful for pinning down when the problem appeared - it's perfectly possible that Greene King (and Graham Greene, etc) simply weren't mentioned at all on the site for several days...

Gengulphus

Gengulphus wrote:Incidentally, I originally searched for "Greene King", but the results said "ignored: king" - this does seem rather over-enthusiastic ignoring to me!

It seems you can't search for any words with less than 5 characters.

Scott.

swill453 wrote:It seems you can't search for any words with less than 5 characters.

This is a recent change by stooz as a temporary fix to try and get around the general slowness of the site. Which appears to be largely cause by a huge amount of entries in the search database. We acknowledge it is a problem as it also means you can't search for tickers. May well be undone (or done more cleverly) when/if we move to a dedicated or faster server. Until then, I'm afraid we'll have to put up with this downgrading of the search facility.

Gryff (wearing moderator hat)

It might be a coincidence, but the site issues that we saw consistently last week do seem to have subsided somewhat since stooz altered the search parameters, so any temporary issues with the search facility might well be a price worth paying in the medium term whilst stooz continues to work on an alternative hosting arrangement.

In the meantime, anyone with a Motley Fool background will probably well remember the long-term structural issues with their search facility, which meant that I almost uniquely used to operate any searches that I wanted to carry out of the Motley Fool site using the very useful functionality included with Google Search, where we can force it to only return search-results from a particular website.

Using that facility to help search The Lemon Fool topics, it can be carried out quite easily using something similar to the following search terms -



Here's a URL link of the above search -

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Alemonfool.co.uk+%22greene+king%22

Other search terms, like entering a particular year perhaps, can also be helpful if you're looking for a particular thread, or also including a posters name if you know they were involved in the specific thread that you're looking for.

Cheers,

Itsallaguess

Yes, I have had to trim down the search. And the site still went down today. I can only join in your frustrations - I have spent hours with the IT team about their poor service.
I have been building a new server but I think I might have to go to a quick fix upgrade which would help matters.

stooz wrote:Y I have spent hours with the IT team about their poor service.

I thought you were the IT team

--kiloran

The server hosting firm