Over the last year the traffic and submissions to search.ie have grown exponentially. Unfortunately the number of spammers submitting rubbish has increased as well.
The site was originally using Links 2 which uses a flatfile database with a perl frontend. Although it was very flexible in terms of templates etc., it did not scale very well, so I moved it to using a MySQL based backend about a year ago. The backend I chose seemed to do what I wanted, but it did not scale very well either.
It suffered from a number of issues:
– The guy who wrote it obviously didn’t know too much about *nix systems
– The MySQL queries were terrible
– The page build process was slow and resource intensive
– Link management was terrible
– It did not scale
I did look for alternatives, but a lot of the ones I came across were simply not suitable.
In the end I got another license for Gossamer Links SQL (glinks) and am now porting the entire DB over to it.
Importing all the existing links manually would have been a long and painful process, so I’m using a plugin from Ultranerds.com
It still requires a lot of cleaning up after the initial import, but it’s well worth it.
With a bit of luck I’ll be able to accept new submissions to search.ie after the weekend or at least at some stage next week.
Michele Neylon :: Pensieri
Technology, Marketing, Domains, Thoughts
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The problem with the search.ie website is, for example if you go into the Business: Building & Construction section it stops at this level.
They need to extend the file system and break it down by plumbing, electrical, flooring etc etc
He should look at DMOZ for an example of structure
DMOZ is a bit demented to be honest 🙂
The new version of search.ie will be online in a few days time and the categories have been expanded upon.
The problem with DMOZ is that you end up with too many depths in some areas, which makes it a bit ridiculous. By default they have a category for every single town and village, which means that you can end up with a silly number of categories with only 1 or 2 links each and little likelihood of them growning.
If you look at the categories on browse.ie you’ll notice that I’ve been culling a lot of the smaller regional ones as they were unnecessary.
I come from a construction background. so when i click business, then building and construction and voila im presented with four pages of comapnies in alphabetical order, no differentiation between trades at all
I can understand having to many layers, but not having enough is also a problem 🙂
Fintan – when I relaunch search.ie you can apply to edit the contruction category 🙂