Tech Behind Search Improvements

Over the summer, we have made several improvements to the new version of the site (Rewrite),. One of the biggest improvements was with search. Since we released Rewrite, the performance of search has been a concern.  We did little to improve the speed before the release because of time constraints. It was decided that we needed to revisit it this summer to get things in great shape for the Fall semester.

We implemented the following changes:

• Cache single word and subject searches - we added Memcached to store some searches.  A cron job is reloading the subject searches into the cache on a regular basis.
• Pagination on Search Result page - previously we were displaying all of the search results on the same page. This caused a long page render time which made the slow search even slower. We are now displaying 10 items on each page. Books are displayed first since most users are looking for books. When possible, we use the cached search results to return the next page.
• Improved SQL performance - we tweaked the SQL used for the queries to optimize them.

All of these changes are no-brainers, but have vastly improved search.