External search URLs

For performance reasons Web Wiz Forums works in the same way a number of other large forums systems work when doing searches.

To save on server resources when a search is carried out it is stored in the web servers memory for 10 minutes, and is only available to that member who created the search, this saves on database hits which are very resource intensive when search through large databases.

Having an external link to a search result would mean that everytime someone clicks that link an intensive search operation would need to be carried out, this isn't so bad if just a few people did this, but imagine if you had a lot of spiders spidering your forum (this site seems to have around 30 spiders on it constantly) every time it came to this search link the intensive search would be done again, and again, and again.

By also caching the search in this way, if the search results are across multiple pages then the search doesn't need to be performed repeatedly when moving between search result pages.

When you find the post you want from the search, you can still always link directly to that posts, with keywords highlighted.


Edited by -boRg- - 21 June 2006 at 10:32am