Ruck,
I feel your pain with the flawed search. I too have been very disappointed with this feature. Don't get me wrong, this program does work. I have been able to post my answers successfully, it is just that it is not as good as it could be.
The search portion is driving me crazy. When I search using it, sometimes it only comes up with one or two answers. While if I check for real, there are dozens of open questions being returned. Do you have any idea why this is the case?
Hopefully Michel will have a response to this concern ASAP. I really want this to work!
Matt
Matt,
I think I can answer that for you. This software uses a centralized script that runs on Michel's server. This script is what searches for open questions on Y! Answers. When it finds open questions, it displays the results in the software and adds these results to an "exclude" list on the server. This exclude list is meant to prevent you from retrieving the same search results over and over again, trying to answer questions that you've already answered.
This is a GOOD thing, if ONE person has access to the exclude list. The problem with using a centralized script like this is that we ALL share this same exclude list. For example, if I were to run a search for a keyword at 5pm today, and then you were to run the same keyword search at 6pm, you would only see the questions that have been asked since 5pm that day (1 maybe 2 questions). All of the other questions from Yahoo Answer's inception to 5pm would already be indexed on the exclude list and unavailable to you.
This may be good in that it keeps us all from spamming the same answers, but that theory also relies on the false premise that we're going to answer ALL of the questions that turn up in our search results, which is just not true. It's also unfair to everyone else who needs to use those keywords.
I've talked with Michel about this, and unless he's proficient enough with PHP to modify the script on his server, the only way around it that I can see is to create a folder on his server for each licensed user to hold the scripts. That way, we'll each have our own individual exclude list.
Edit: Also, even if he was to implement individual script folders for each licensed user, he'll have to re-code the software to point to and use this new script location. I suppose this could be done by adding in a place in the software to manually enter the location of such a folder/script.
