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"Do a search" - Bad advice?
Former Member
Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
Time after time (especially in the Sex forum, but in others too) people asking a question that has often been asked before a told to do a search.
Oh dear.
The search feature, in two separate tests has shown to be worse than useless, being very time consuming with no result at all.
Go to the sex forum, click the link in the forum to search.
In the tests we deliberately chose to search for 'masterbation' being a small but common enough misspelling. It also being a subject that occurs a lot more often than most.
My girlfriend tried this first while I was at her place this weekend. She has standard dial-up access to the internet. After a few minutes we got a screen saying it had so far located 7 matches and was resuming the search...
After 10 minutes of this it still was announcing 7 matches, (but still wouldn't actually show the matches) and was still taking us back for further searching... At that point we gave up. I reckon any real user would almost certainly have given up after 5 minutes, and statistics across the web show that you lose 50% of visitors within 60 seconds of delay.
Anyway, I decided to try this test again today from work. Here I have a leased line (T1 line) permanently connected to the internet. Speed is good and I can download a 5Mb file in about 3 minutes on average.
So I did the same search 'masterbation', and waited...
and waited...
and waited...
and... you get the idea...
After 4 whole minutes I gave up.
So, in my experience the search is worthless. It is not useable in the way any webmaster accepts as functional.
Just thought that would be worth discussion, and worth some other members checking out for themselves.
Oh dear.
The search feature, in two separate tests has shown to be worse than useless, being very time consuming with no result at all.
Go to the sex forum, click the link in the forum to search.
In the tests we deliberately chose to search for 'masterbation' being a small but common enough misspelling. It also being a subject that occurs a lot more often than most.
My girlfriend tried this first while I was at her place this weekend. She has standard dial-up access to the internet. After a few minutes we got a screen saying it had so far located 7 matches and was resuming the search...
After 10 minutes of this it still was announcing 7 matches, (but still wouldn't actually show the matches) and was still taking us back for further searching... At that point we gave up. I reckon any real user would almost certainly have given up after 5 minutes, and statistics across the web show that you lose 50% of visitors within 60 seconds of delay.
Anyway, I decided to try this test again today from work. Here I have a leased line (T1 line) permanently connected to the internet. Speed is good and I can download a 5Mb file in about 3 minutes on average.
So I did the same search 'masterbation', and waited...
and waited...
and waited...
and... you get the idea...
After 4 whole minutes I gave up.
So, in my experience the search is worthless. It is not useable in the way any webmaster accepts as functional.
Just thought that would be worth discussion, and worth some other members checking out for themselves.
Post edited by JustV on
0
Comments
I searched the sex forum only, both masturbation and masterbation provided results.
A lot of those posting on the boards with questions about masturbation would probably find articles like this more useful than a half-arsed response from posters bored with the same old questions.
[ 25-02-2002: Message edited by: Kentish ]
Maybe another side-effect of the recent upgrade stuff? Who knows. Whatever. Its working now - got my results in about 40 seconds.
These include private archives the mods use, the old valentines archives and probably test archives that were used to test out the system.
This can take a very long time on even a fast connection.
Seems okay now though, so either:
(a) the techies at thesite know what probably caused it and it was just temporary while they did something essential.
(b) there was a bug they already detected and fixed.
(c) it was one of those abberant behaviour tricks computers pull every now and then to make us feel dumb and put us in our places.
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