BOSS Hacks – an unofficial Yahoo! BOSS blog

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.