BOSS Hacks - an unofficial Yahoo! BOSS blog » Troubleshooting http://www.bosshacks.com Wed, 03 Feb 2010 17:03:40 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Watch that Request Length http://www.bosshacks.com/watch-that-request-length.html http://www.bosshacks.com/watch-that-request-length.html#comments Tue, 15 Dec 2009 00:37:12 +0000 Ted http://www.bosshacks.com/?p=163 Yahoo! BOSS‘s sites param gives us great flexibility in creating vertical search engines. However, we are limited by the number of characters. Here are some tips in keeping the length as short as possible.

  1. Forget passing subdirectories: foo.com/bar is considered the same as foo.com. BOSS will differentiate between subdomains bar.foo.com is not the same as foo.com. In a real-world example passing finance.yahoo.com/news will be interpreted as finance.yahoo.com. But finance.yahoo.com will give a different result than sports.yahoo.com.
  2. Remove www from the url. This is just wasting space. There may be an exception when the site was not setup to work without the www subdomain. I doubt this would make an impact.
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]]> http://www.bosshacks.com/watch-that-request-length.html/feed 0 Troubleshooting: Watch for extra commas http://www.bosshacks.com/troubleshooting-boss-commas.html http://www.bosshacks.com/troubleshooting-boss-commas.html#comments Tue, 28 Apr 2009 09:51:28 +0000 Ted http://www.bosshacks.com/?p=42 I’m working on a new art search engine that features a large list of museums in the sites attribute. The url length is pushing the limits of the http char count, so I assumed my problems of spam sites infiltrating results was based on the string length.

A recent discussion on the BOSS users mailing list led me to discuss this with one of the BOSS engineers today and we discovered a more basic problem with my requests. I was sending extra commas in the string. Instead of this: moma.org,louvre.fr I had moma.org,,louvre.fr.

Sometimes you need to go back to basics to find your problems. Thanks to Mithun for helping me out.

I don’t know if this is the cause of Michael’s problems in the original mailing list request, but it is a good thing to remember.

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