On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 12:14 PM, Patrick O'Callaghan
<pocallaghan@gmail.com> wrote:
> I just searched for "googlesmithing" with nothing fancy. Popped right up.
I am not trying to find googlesmithing on the web. I am trying to find
it (and more generally, any search term) strictly within the archives
of the fedora users list.
I don't want the entire web, or even all of linux, because very often
I am searching for the sort of stuff where the correct answer for
debian or suse is noise for fedora. Often I know something has been
discussed here, so I don't want to waste bandwidth by posting again,
yet I do want to find the answer, which is no longer among my emails.
So I want to use google but generate only hits that have appeared on
this list as posts, just as if the list archive had a reasonable
search function of its own instead of the bizarre thread/date/author
organization. If possible, I'd also like to avoid getting multiple
hits for a single post.
(As an aside, does anyone ever get any use out of the archive using
that web interface at redhat? I guess I could drill right down to the
right post if I remembered who wrote it or what the exact subject was
or when it was discussed, but I almost never remember any of that. And
it's way too big for linear search.)
Usually I attempt to search the archive by adding
'site:https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list' to my list of
google search terms. Because I am getting lazy and would like to
automate or simplify that, this thread got split off the
googlesmithing thread.
When I search for "googlesmithing" by itself, I get several hits
(fcp.surfsite.org, www.mail-archive.com, linux.derkeiler.com, etc.),
but none at redhat.com, which I had thought of as the official
home/archive of the list. Was that my mistake?
Maybe redhat is slow updating the archive? No, the googlesmithing
thread is there
(https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2008-August/msg02132.html)
if you navigate by date.
It must be that google is slow indexing it? Google does give hits at
redhat's URL if you try some other terms. I just searched for
site:https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list fedora
and the youngest hit on the first page was from May 2008. Then I added
a date restriction:
past 24 hours = no hits
past week = one hit
past month = two hits?!!?????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
past 2 months = 14 hits?
past 3 months = 53 hits?
WTF! Try another site.... fedora site:http://fcp.surfsite.org....
past 24 hours = 1 hit
past week = 1 hit
past month = 800 hits
After this little experiment, I do not know whether to ask for
thorazine or zoloft. I love both google and redhat, but sometimes ya
gotta wonder.
Could google be indexing only some of the posts? Randomizing their
indexing? Excluding 'fedora'? Excluding headers, addresses, etc.?
Could the age of a page be judged by something other than the age of
the post it contains, so somehow posts that were created this week
would somehow show up as hits in google searches only if the search
accepts month-old stuff?
Are any of these other sources (fcp.surfsite.org,
www.mail-archive.com, linux.derkeiler.com, etc.) more 'official' than
others? They at least seem like they might be more up-to-date? I guess
that should be the topic of my next study, but not today!
Dave
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