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Date:      Fri, 18 Oct 2002 18:04:07 -0700
From:      Mike Thompson <mike@atomz.com>
To:        freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   New search implementation 
Message-ID:  <4.3.2.7.2.20021018174037.00af87e0@pop.atomz.com>

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Hi everyone,

As time permits I've been working on an Atomz Search implementation for the 
FreeBSD.org web site.  As a co-founder of Atomz and someone who has really 
benefited much from the FreeBSD project I thought it would be appropriate 
to donate to the FreeBSD organization our search service which normally 
sells for many $10,000's a year to large corporations.  Unfortunately, my 
time is not a free as I would like, but the current results of my efforts 
can be found at the following URL:

http://www.atomz.com/freebsd/

At this time I would like to start working with other people involved with 
FreeBSD documentation project to help push this search project along.  Your 
thoughts and comments are welcome, but some help would also be valuable.

Some notes regarding what I have done so far are:

1. This is currently only for the FreeBSD.org English web pages.  It does 
not include any of the foreign language portions of the site.  The foreign 
language portions of the site would be relatively easy to implement, but I 
would need help constructing search pages and templates from a native 
speaker of the language.  Are there specific suggestions on what other 
languages should be implemented and what would be the best way to go about 
this?

2. The search implementation doesn't currently include the email list 
archives.  With nearly a million messages to be indexed it will be a bit of 
a project to implement.  I'll start looking into more into searching the 
email archives once there is a general consensus that the basic search of 
the other portions of the web site are looking pretty good.

3. The Atomz Search index will be updated nightly at 4 am PST.  This will 
make sure that the index reflects any changes to the web site on a daily 
basis.  The reindex time can be changed to another value if desired.

4. I'm open to hosting the search form at any location.  I placed it on our 
www.atomz.com web site because the Atomz IT team makes sure that this site 
stays up at all times and it can handle a pretty heavy traffic 
loads.  However, we can move the search page to anywhere the FreeBSD 
documentation team would like it.

5. I haven't spent a lot of time tweaking the Atomz Search options for the 
site.  I would like to grant access to volunteers on the FreeBSD 
documentation team access to the search account so that you can verify the 
entire site is being properly indexed by looking at the crawl logs.  Also, 
someone else may find options in Atomz Search that may be useful that I'm 
currently overlooking.  I don't have a full understanding of how the 
FreeBSD documentation project is organized.  Are there core people who 
would be most appropriate for having access to the FreeBSD search engine or 
is really a grass roots volunteer effort?

6. I'm open to any and all suggestions with regards to the search 
implementation.  Atomz Search is a powerful search application and I would 
bet we could handle most suggestions made about the search engine.

I hope that the search engine continues to look interesting to the FreeBSD 
documentation project.  I'm sorry I haven't been able to jump on this as 
quickly as I had hoped, but like most other people having a day job in this 
tough economy tends to take priority.

Thanks,

Mike Thompson
CTO/Co-Founder
Atomz Corp.
mike@atomz.com


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