I'll second and third your opinion.  I've had to use the new search engine recently to search
for an Error 11: Could not receive on socket message we were getting.  The new search engine
return something which had nothing to do with sockets or networking.  I had to use the old
search engine to get any useful information.

Carol Evers
Imation Corporation

Stan Sieler wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> (and Bcc to two HP ESC people)
>
> Well, HP ESC has changed again...for the worse!
>
> The search mechanism used to be terrible, and was then upgraded
> in 1998 to be merely poor.  Now, well...now it's worse than ever.
>
> Able to search by document type?
>
>   Before: trivial...just click the box for category types you want
>
>   Now:    you tell me!  The "Help" page takes you to a extremely short
>           text page that barely mentions categories, but provides just
>           enough information to imply that maybe, just *maybe*, you might
>           and to add "AND SR" to a search string to select documents of
>           type "SR".  Nope...doesn't work.
>
> Able to get results sorted by date?
>
>    Before: easy (although I couldn't figure out how to get that to be
>                  the default):  click on the "DATE" column.
>
>    Now:    not possible, apparently.
>
> Able to use "NOT" operator?
>
>    Before: not easy (different from every major search engine!), but possible.
>
>    Now:    who knows?  It's not even mentioned on the help page!
>
> Able to see how many documents your search matched?
>
>    Before: easy (number was reported...and you could tell if more than
>                  100 (the maximum displayed) happened to match!)
>
>    Now:    count 'em yourself!   (No way to determine if more than 100
>            matched, because you only get 100 back)
>
> Able to see "score" for document?
>
>    Before: yes
>
>    Now:    no
>
> Able to read date for document?
>
>    Before: YYYYMMDD
>
>    Now:    YYYY Mon DD     (better, thanks!)
>
> One change that I'm not sure is good or bad is that the selection boxes
> for computer/OS type (e.g., MPE, HP-UX, Windows, etc.) has become a
> "click on this branch of the tree" hierarchy ... better for some searches,
> worse for others.  Still, I guess I like the new stuff slightly better.
>
> I'm not sure anyone read some of the help text...
> the main search page has a sentence at the bottom:
>    For a limited time, you may access the previous version of the Technical Knowledge Base
> I don't want to use the prior version of the *DATA* ... I want to use the
> prior version of the *SEARCH PAGE*.
> (Yes, it appears to be that the text should have said "you may access the prior
> version of the search engine")
>
> Tip for HP:
>
>    For pages that contain static data, and are "leaf" pages (e.g., "Search Syntax"),
>    you'll save your servers some effort, and our browsers some work, if the links for
>    such pages went to *STATIC* HTML pages, not pages with the stupid "sid=" which you
>    generate on the fly.  *Let* the user click on "back" to get back from the
>    "Search Syntax" page, for example...we don't need the fancy customized HP ESC
>    "bar" on the top of that page!
>
> --
> Stan Sieler                                          [log in to unmask]
>                                      http://www.allegro.com/sieler.html