Similar threads

[Mucello]

As many of you know, a lot of message boards have a box near the bottom of the page that contains links to similar threads. I assume it has to somehow "look" at each post within each thread? How is that done? I'm not looking for specific code, just a conceptual explanation of how an algorithm compares two threads and determines if they are highly similar or not.

Mark

[planetsim]

This is normal for newthreads basically it does a search of keywords (all words) within the title. Compared to other titles within the database. You can search the board on how to search with MySQL or searching database.

[Mucello]

Okay, so it only compares the TITLES and not the actual contents of the post? I guess comparing the contents of the post would be too intensive to do on the fly?