Site search finally available
25th April 2003
I’ve finally got around to adding a search page to this site. It uses MySQL’s full text indexing, which is extremely fast and provides good results but comes at the expense of flexibility. Search terms less than 4 letters long are ignored, and multi-word searches are handled using OR rather than AND. This nearly put me off using it, but the relevancy algorithm is excellent which I think outweighs the disadvantage of not being able to use pure AND queries.
MySQL 4.0 introduces far more powerful boolean mode full text searches which allow all kinds of modifiers and extra syntax, but this site currently runs on 3.23.54 so I can’t play with those just yet. Jeremy Zawodny’s article on MySQL 4 explains boolean mode and describes many other exciting new MySQL features as well.
More recent articles
- Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on my laptop drew me a better pelican than Claude Opus 4.7 - 16th April 2026
- Meta's new model is Muse Spark, and meta.ai chat has some interesting tools - 8th April 2026
- Anthropic's Project Glasswing - restricting Claude Mythos to security researchers - sounds necessary to me - 7th April 2026