Date: Mon, 1 Jan 2007 16:49:46 -0500 (EST) From: John L <johnl@iecc.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Indexing a largish collection of mail and usenet messages? Message-ID: <20070101164839.G69971@simone.iecc.com>
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I have a collection of archives of mailing list and news messages. The largest collection is pretty big, about 150,000 messages which means about 200 megabytes of text, shortly to be migrated to a FreeBSD server. The lists are all active so archives typically add a few messages each day. I want to provide a full text search of each archive. What software should I use? I have been using the sturdy but ancient lqtext package. It's OK, but it has a few bugs I have yet to pick and I'm wondering if something better is available. First, I am NOT, repeat NOT, asking about web spiders. The messages are directly available to indexing software as files on my server, so there's no advantage to running them through Apache on the way to the indexer. Also, the messages in the archive never change and I know what files are new each day, so it would be pointless for a package to re-spider the whole archive to look for the new messages. I am not unalterably opposed to something that spiders if it is otherwise wonderful, but that approach hasn't been fruitful in the past. What I want ideally is something that knows enough about the structure of mail messages to deal intelligently with headers vs. body, that can do something reasonable with MIME and HTML bodies (not urgent, I can always run them through demime on the way to the index), and most importantly that actually works with 150,000 messages. I've seen lots of packages that look promising but that fall over dead once they get past 10,000 messages or so. User interface isn't particularly important, I can plug it into my existing stuff so long as it has the basic functions of taking search terms and giving back the locations of the matches. To see the current version, bugs and all, see http://compilers.iecc.com/compsearch.phtml The comp.compilers archive is also indexed in Google and other public search engines, which works splendidly, but most of the other lists are private so Google is out. Any suggestions? Tnx. R's, John
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