Search behaviour question

ban-all-sheds · 7 Mar 2014

Given a search which returns several pages of results, it's possible to step through the pages by clicking the on the numbers or > at the bottom.

Result Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 >

As I do, the page number in the URL increases

//search.diynot.com/forum_search.php ... {blahblahblah} ... &page=10

But manually changing the page number in the URL so as to skip forward faster doesn't work - I get

Query failed: Your query contains invalid characters or in invalid search pattern. Please try again.

Why is this? (It's not, BTW, because I've tried to go past the last page of results).

jtonline · 8 Mar 2014

It worked OK when I just tried it. E.g:

//search.diynot.com/forum_search.php?sortbytime=0&q=cpc&stype=0&page=59

ban-all-sheds · 8 Mar 2014

//search.diynot.com/forum_search.php?sortbytime=0&q=cpc&stype=0&page=200 doesn't work, but there are 5923 results, so you should be able to go up to //search.diynot.com/forum_search.php?sortbytime=0&q=cpc&stype=0&page=593

RogueHanger · 8 Mar 2014

I get a limit of 100. And there's no more pages indicated.

ban-all-sheds · 8 Mar 2014

Ah - that's what it is.

That search starts out telling you that it's showing results 1 - 10 of 5923, which does, IMO, imply that you would actually be able to get to all 5923, get to a page showing 1001 - 1010 of 5923, then 1011 - 1020, and eventually page 593, showing 5921 - 5923.

ban-all-sheds · 10 Mar 2014

ADMIN - is it documented anywhere that only 100 pages of results are viewable, no matter how many are found?

Is it supposed to be this way?

DIYnot · 10 Mar 2014

Scanning over the code, results are limited to the first 1000. At 10/page that is 100 pages. I'm not sure without investigating further why the results are capped at 1000, I will look into it.

jtonline · 10 Mar 2014

It seems to be a common restriction on search engines, including Google.

I expect that to increase performance and reduce strain on the server, the forum search results here are generated and then temporarily cached. When your browser requests a page of results the software doesn't have to query the database again, it just looks at the cache. One reason for restricting the search results to 1000 posts would be to keep the cache storage for each search to a reasonable size. But I may be wrong

ban-all-sheds · 10 Mar 2014

jtonline said:
It seems to be a common restriction on search engines, including Google.

One would hope that people who create search tools would not join Google in their race for the bottom.

Search behaviour question

RogueHanger

Similar threads