January 13, 2004

  • “(yes, the search bar actually does something now - try it out!)”  -Marc, on the new Real Xanga Search


     


    But what does it do?


     


    Well, first, you’re either in or out:  “For our beta launch of search, we've indexed about half of the users on the site, with all of their posts (my emphasis) as of late December.”  -Marc


     


    Well, it appears, I’m “in” since I do show up on some hits.  But…


     


    I have my own blog search on the side, and have had it for some time, sponsored by Atomz.  I just searched my blog with it for the term ‘xangods’ and got 26 hits, 17 of which are unique (my search had 9 duplicates).


     


    I also just used the Xanga "Real" Search to search for ‘xangods’ and got back only 6 unique hits attributed to me (there are some for some other members also).  It seems that Xanga “Real” Search was only able to cough up 35% of my own actual occurrences of this term.   That’s terrible!


     


    So are the other 11 hits I get on my Atomz search not indexed under Xanga’s “Real” Search?  Not necessarily not !  One of my hits on the Atomz search has the words ‘xangods’ and ‘edict’ adjacent to each other.  Xanga’s “Real” Search doesn’t provide this post as a hit when simply searching for the term ‘xangods’, but if you search it for ‘xangods edict’, it does.  Which means it is indexed, but doesn’t return it for a hit under the less restrictive condition.  That is totally unacceptable behavior for a search engine: it’s failingly non-exhaustive and unpredictably fickle.


     


    A real, comprehensive, reliable, and up-to-date search on Xanga would be a great asset, especially to those, like frejaluna and others, who are concerned about some other unethical xangans plagiaristically reposting their work.


     


    Here is part of my response to frejaluna’s post on a discovery of xangan plagiarism:


     


    “I really thing Xanga needs to repair, reinvest, and revamp the Xanga search engine.  It's currently totally inoperative, but if it worked well (timely, accurately, comprehensively), at least we could all search all of Xanga for unique strings of our own text that would identify a thief beyond a doubt.”


     


    The sad thing, given the outcome of my comparisons above, is that even for those who are already indexed (like myself and many others) the search furnishes incomplete, hence non-assuring, results.  It will only be truly useful if, besides covering all posts (inclusive—and they are promising this ), it works according to comprehensible, non-excluding (exhaustive) search rules—which, for now, it doesn’t ( and without any assurance that it ever will be fixed ).

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