W3C Mail Search Engine gets an update

W3C's MASE search engine got a nice new year present, in the shape of a new server. The additional computing muscle will be well-used to index and search among the hundreds of thousands of messages on the W3C's mailing-list forums.

Taunting two knights with one stone, we also took the opportunity to give the search interface a fresh layer of CSS paint, and, among other updates, a Period search feature which can be used to limit search results to a given Month and/or Year.

All this is possible thanks to the great team developing the Namazu engine as an open source project. Namazu is not supposed to be used on such a massive set of data as the W3C lists, but it works: our hacking was, and is, mostly limited to interfacing the engine with our lists system, and make indexing of individual lists real-time.

Update: for some gritty details on how the mail search works, see this companion entry in the W3C Systems Team blog.

Any bug you'd like to report on the search engine? Features that we really should be adding? The comment form is all yours!