Since FreeFind is taking so long, I decided to look again for some way of doing our own search. I found a script that loads nicely, and started it indexing the archives. It’s been going at it for over 2 hours now and is only about a fifth of the way through by my estimation. The test searches I’ve done on what’s already indexed shows that it’s really fast. This means rather than searching just the little bit that FreeFind archived, we’ll be able to search the entire archives. It also means that as I add posts to the archives I can index just the new ones, rather than have to do the whole thing over again.

I’m also formatting the posts that haven’t been included in the archive so they’ll be ready to upload as soon as the new script finishes indexing the current posts. That means I’ll then have to index the new posts, and it looks like I’ve got almost a year’s worth.

Another advantage which I’ll look into is that I may be able to index the current board on a regular basis so new posts can be added to what is searched.

Another interesting thing is that while the archives themselves only take up about 35 meg so far with about a fourth of the archives indexed, the index is 56 meg. So it looks like indexing the archives will take up quite a bit of space. I recently had to move my web hosting client accounts (there were only a dozen) to a different server, so I have more room on this one, but I’ll be cutting back back on the size of this account since I moved all of the paying accounts away.