new search engine

I figured I'd make a public announcement that the search engine is basically done for the moment. You can now search by any number of terms. For example, "sakura" will get you 1000+ cels of a certain intrepid, rollerblading adventurer, but "sakura tower" will net a few cels from the episode staged near Tokyo Tower.

Just type in whatever you want to look for and select the catagory you want to look through in that thing in the upper right hand corner of this page.

Have fun.

I really like the new search feature, but I have one question. Is there a way to force it to use only full-word matches? For example, I searched for mercury, and it worked great - it returned about 73 matches involving Sailor Mercury. Then I searched for ami, and I got something like 1500 matches. Anything that had ami even within a word was included - sasami, tsunami, even macadamian. Is there any way I can restrict it to only matches where the full word is ami?

Yeah, I know about this. The other day, I searched for "lain" and found lots of "villains". Yeah!

This is part of the "mostly academic" stuff I was talking about above. I looked at it for ten minutes and didn't think there was a good way around it because of the really (and I mean, *really*) naive way that it searches the database.

I'll see if there's anything that can be done about it that won't slow down the search any more.

Oh wait, looking through my database book on full-text searching, I think I'm a moron. Hold on.

EDIT: Okay, I'm biting the bullet and just making a real (read: fast) search... at least for the cel search. I was able to alter the search to do whole words, but it takes anywhere from 8 to 12 seconds. Argh. A real search should take somewhere in the neighborhood of 0.08 and 0.1 seconds to execute. I'll return later this evening with the results.

Wow! Now this is what I call on-demand service. Seriously, though, I was just making a suggestion. I didn't mean you had to drop everything and work on this. Hope it didn't take you away from something else.

Eh, it's one of those research things that is one of the main reasons for the existance of this site.

Searches with two or more words work again. Find a Hikaru from lots of different shows, for example.

Fushigi Yuugi
http://www.rubberslug.com/search/Default.aspx?sec=all&s=hikaru+fushigi

Orange Road
http://www.rubberslug.com/search/Default.aspx?sec=all&s=hikaru+madoka

Rayearth
http://www.rubberslug.com/search/Default.aspx?sec=all&s=hikaru+rayearth

Hyper Police or Hyper Speed Gran Doll
http://www.rubberslug.com/search/Default.aspx?sec=art&s=hikaru+hyper

Need to make adding and editing items update the search engine now that the search doesn't "directly" search items. Other searches still use the stupid method, but they're pretty fast anyway.

After that, probably moving on to shop/weblog/photo galleries.