Originally posted Friday, July 24. Updated and reposted July 27, 2009.

Yay.

We’re rolling out a new search framework for LJWorld.com, and we invite you to take it for a spin and give us your thoughts. Let us know how it works for you; what you like; what you don’t: anything, really, related to searching and finding content on our site.

Our new search tool is based on a framework called Haystack, a Django project developed by Mediaphormedia’s Daniel Lindsley. If you’re geeky and wonkishly inclined, do check it out.

If you like, you can comment below on anything you like related to this beta search.

Some known issues:

1. Search suggestions sometimes aren’t as accurate as we’d like. We definitely want to hear if the search suggests something particularly odd. (Say, you search for “Zebrh,” and it says, “Did you mean rhinoceros?”)

2. In some circumstances, the number of results returned is incorrect. The page might say “30 results found,” and yet only 27 are shown.

3. You’ll likely find certain kinds of search results that are not fully displayed. For instance, an MP3 will match a search, and yet in the results page there’ll be no link to the MP3. You’ll just see text. That represents a result still needing to be templated.

We hope to have these issues wrapped up by Wednesday (it could be sooner), and we’ll make every effort to fix bugs and issues that users report as quickly as we can.

Special thanks to Daniel Lindsley, Matt Croydon and Christian Metts for getting this in shape for everyone to try out.

We’re quite excited about how Haystack will allow us to organize and present our content in new ways — and even more importantly how it will give users new tools to organize and make use of content as you see fit.

So, your feedback is definitely appreciated. You can also follow / converse with LJWorldLabs on Twitter, if you’re into that kind of thing.