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I have a shortcut in my Browser bookmarks which goes to:

https://stackoverflow.com/search?tab=newest&q=answers:0%20[c%23]

I'm sure it used to work, but not it seems to include questions with answers. I don't mean that I click through and they have answers (that could just be caching, of answers posted between my loading the page and clicking a result), but the page actually shows the numbers of answers!

Has this changed/become broken recently?

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The search index is updated every 15 minutes, so you can see some lag/mismatch here since the post data we pull as a result of searching our index is real-time.

Also yesterday especially our indexing was a little....wacky?...due to changing our core network switches (another update here). We index on our web tier for a few reasons:

  • we have greatly under-utilized hardware there
  • we're always happy to give the DB server even more breathing room
  • it gives us a great deal of redundancy

Now, that being said, it doesn't really work well when yanking cables killing index sessions mid-index, which caused more delay than usual yesterday, the indexes got hours behind on Stack Overflow particularly because some directory locks couldn't be cleared correctly. This issue was fixed in a deploy last night and we kicked off an optimize to slim all those fragments back down as well, indexes are now updating normally.

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  • Thanks for the info. Certainly looks better today - only one of the posts on the newest list for me has answers already.
    – Danny Tuppeny
    Feb 27 '11 at 12:24
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I copied your link into my browser and it returns correctly with all results on the first page having 0 answers.

The search box had a redesign recently that slightly changed the syntax. I'd suggest rerunning your query and re-bookmark it:

https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=answers%3A0+[c%23]

There appears to be slight differences with how the punctuation gets sanitized.

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  • I copied your link, and it seemed to work. However, when I added "tab=newest" the same thing happened, it shows results with answers!
    – Danny Tuppeny
    Feb 26 '11 at 13:58
  • @Danny: My guess is that the query is based on data that is slightly old(i.e. cached over the last few minutes), but since the "newest" questions are on the front page, they have a lot of current activity. Those with answers I saw on the "newest" tab had all been posted in the last three minutes.
    – yhw42
    Feb 26 '11 at 14:04
  • That could be it - I guess there could be a cache used to decide what questions to show, but the actual question data (or number of answers, at least) is coming from a more up-to-date cache. Feels like a bug though - the caches should ideally be synchronised to avoid this!
    – Danny Tuppeny
    Feb 26 '11 at 14:09

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