Hi,

(sorry if this post appears twice, having problems with the submission page and 
our firewall)

I’m looking for other peoples opinion on searching via a database vs. Verity 
searches.

I’m building new search pages for our course information system, with the end 
result being website and course information results being combined (if 
required) or filtering the results based on things like, course information 
only, campus location, course type e.g. mainstream, application only courses 
etc.

Currently the course information search pages are different to the site search. 
 Course Information searches an MSSQL database whereas the site search uses a 
couple of verity collections (via FarCry).

The Verity engine is a little more limited than what I originally thought, for 
example: you can only search the contents of the body, not the custom1, 2, 3 
and 4 fields or the title field.  I did have a look at using the new Category 
feature, but aside from it still being too limited (by the amount of fields I 
possibly need to filter by) it’s considerably slower to search than when not 
using categories.  Using a small sample of 1250 records, searching without 
categories took an average of 150ms, when restricting the same search using 
categories it took on average 3500ms.
So where I’m up to now is either 

1)      Not using Verity for the course information and going back to searching 
against the database.  I could split the site search result page to display two 
separated results, one based on the database (course info) and the other on the 
verity collection (website).  You then would select which set of results to 
continue on with for page 2.

2)      Building x number of verity collections for each type of course 
information search (application courses, mainstream etc) and combine these when 
searching.  The would mean that the body of all these collections would have 
identical information, which just feels wrong.

3)      Attach the different types of filtering options (as keywords) to the 
end of the body section with some type of marker to let me know from that point 
on is filtering keywords and to strip them out before displaying the text on 
the results page.  I need to give this one a bit more thought, but this 
doesn’t feel very future proof.

Any other suggestions?

Thanks for your time.

Regards,

Mark Picker
Internet Developer - External Business Systems
http://www.wit.tafensw.edu.au/

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