Date: Fri, 14 Jun 2002 08:51:33 +0100 From: Nik Clayton <nik@freebsd.org> To: Eric Anderson <anderson@centtech.com> Cc: doc@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Search engine enhancements Message-ID: <20020614085133.V39690@canyon.nothing-going-on.org> In-Reply-To: <3D08A7DB.8BE28A90@centtech.com>; from anderson@centtech.com on Thu, Jun 13, 2002 at 09:10:35AM -0500 References: <3D08A7DB.8BE28A90@centtech.com>
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--IjgjYm7ZLtdx4pCv Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable On Thu, Jun 13, 2002 at 09:10:35AM -0500, Eric Anderson wrote: > I saw this on the FreeBSD documentation site, as a current project. Is a= nyone > currently working on this? =20 Not that I know of. > I would love to jump into this project see what we > can do. What do I need to do to get started? Come up with a better search engine interface and backend than what we're currently using, preferably based on software that's available in the ports tree so that it's trivial for mirrors to set up. "better" in this case is subjective, and I can't recall a thread in here that's really covered a 'wishlist' of requirements for a better search system. So lets start one. Off the top of my head: The set of search operators is too small. I'd like to be able to limit my search to text that appears in the: Subject line Body text From/To address I'd like to do queries by date, so that I can search for messages that match only in the last 3 months. I'd like the bug that makes it flaky when you search more than three mailing list archives fixed. Viewing the thread that a message comes from is painful. Google have solved this in a particularly nice way -- you can view all the messages in a thread, in thread order, on a single page, using their Google Groups interface. An alternative way of specifying the mailing lists to search would be nice. Keep the checkboxes, but give me a box where I can type in "arch,current,hackers" to limit the search to just those lists -- I can type that much faster than I can navigate the mouse over to three fairly small interface elements and click. Especially if I have to scroll the screen in order to=20 reach all the checkboxes. Lose the requirement to specify "AND" and "OR" as connectives in the query string. The string =09 foo bar baz should rank messages that feature all three words high in the results. Messages that only feature two of them should be a little lower, and so on. Maybe use the (fairly) standard notation +foo +bar baz to indicate that 'foo' and 'bar' are mandatory, and that baz is optional. It's not clear when you limit the number of search results how the limit is done. Does it just stop when it finds the first 'n' results? Or does it gather all of them, order them, and show you the first 'n'. Better to generate a page of 'n' results at a time, where the user can specify how many results they want per page. When viewing the results, highlight the terms in the search that=20 matched in the text (maybe). Anyone else? N --=20 FreeBSD: The Power to Serve http://www.freebsd.org/ (__) FreeBSD Documentation Project http://www.freebsd.org/docproj/ \\\'',) \/ \= ^ --- 15B8 3FFC DDB4 34B0 AA5F 94B7 93A8 0764 2C37 E375 --- .\._/= _) --IjgjYm7ZLtdx4pCv Content-Type: application/pgp-signature Content-Disposition: inline -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.7 (FreeBSD) iD8DBQE9CaCFk6gHZCw343URAmUpAJ9eHmHni1vWObdtW5eOkqDbcrIHCgCfcH4Z mxhzuM51l2u+4+HG00JrQt0= =wXXn -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --IjgjYm7ZLtdx4pCv-- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-doc" in the body of the message
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