Super Search Sort Order

[AcidHawk]

At The risk of labouring this point I would like the communities' opinion on getting Super Search to display the newest nodes first by default.

I have read through Newest Super Search and seen a small refference to this issue and again looked at (tye)Re: Newest Super Search where the code for Super Search is posted. It seems to me that the results of a query are displayed in order of nodeID.

I may be WAY off the mark here but couldn't we add DESC after the ORDER BY n.node_id and make the code look like ORDER BY n.node_id DESC in this way presenting the nodes in newest order first..?

I try and search often using Super Search and often have to re-do searches to present more recent results.

Would we not find more recent and possibly more pertinent answers if we just reversed the search order..? (Not that there is anything wrong with older posts.. far from it)

Will not the newer nodes deal more with the later versions of Perl?

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Of all the things I've lost in my life, its my mind I miss the most.

[iguanodon]

You've got my vote, literally.

Would we not find more recent and possibly more pertinent answers if we just reversed the search order..?

I think so. I've used Super Search recently to find nodes that I knew were only a few days or weeks old, but all I could remember was a keyword.

How about letting the user decide? The Newest first -or- Oldest first option is there, but disabled.

[AcidHawk]

AS far as I understand letting the user decide "Newest first -or- Oldest first" requires a large amount of re-work i.e. coding etc...

The options are there but are disabled. I am merely looking for a (What I think is a) short term solution, which would make many monks' searches a little more productive and if my thinking is correct more results would be reached in less queries thereby putting less load on the database.

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Of all the things I've lost in my life, its my mind I miss the most.

[tye]

I understand letting the user decide [...] requires a large amount of re-work

I have no idea where you got that impression. I said:

I'd like to support searching "newest nodes first" but the MySQL optimizer will likely fight me on this.

which has nothing to do with the amount of work involved.

Switching from always oldest first to always newest first is only a little less work than letting you choose between the two. The problem is that sorting on descending keys doesn't optimize very well in this version of MySQL (the documentation describes how this is caused by NULL values, but we don't have or even allow NULL values for that field so that shouldn't apply but testing shows that it certainly does).

So there is a moderate amount of work to put in support for searching most recent nodes first. But there is also a good chance that after that work is done the option will often be useless because the optimizer won't work well when you select that option and so your search will not be done.

So it is just a matter of someone finding the time. It isn't a priority because super search is very useful (at least to me) as it is, the work might well not pay off anyway, it isn't as much fun as some other items, and there are more important problems to deal with (to name a few reasons).

                - tye