A progress report on my project. My SoC project originally had to do with improvements to XMLLibrarian and XMLSpider to provide a better search experience to freenet users, particularly helping with the issue of newcomers to freenet starting up a search and seeing nothing happening for ages. Some of my original targets have changed though as infinity0's work on new index formats has meant I have not been having to change the index format to include more metadata.
Some of my original targets and status: Asynchronous searching - the current official version of XMLLibrarian from the work I did in easter runs searches separately from showing progress so that the page is not blank. In my forked version searches for different terms and on different indexes are run at the same time to speed this progress further. Search progress - the current version shows the raw description of the fetch progress from the ClientGetter's fetching the indexes. My newer version uses ajax to update the progress and get the results, avoiding screen refreshes if you have javascript enabled in your browser. Progress bars are also shown for each fetch. I did have partial results being shown as some of the fetches complete but it had implications on performance and I had doubts on whether it would be of use to anyone. Result listing - commits last week were working on better displaying of search results, including grouping SSK sites and hiding older versions of them, showing uri's and USK links (I think people were asking for that). Search querys - the most recent work I have been doing, not & or operations are working well (as far as my tests have gone), I have been implementing phrase searching but it is not working for a reason I am yet to determine. This work is availiable in my fork git://github.com/platy/plugin-XMLLibrarian-staging.git it is ready to be merged back into the freenet staging repository, hopefully into the official as well after review. Other items in my proposal that need to be done are: Recording meta data in the spider, this will allow more information on the search page and (some)search relevance ranking. Use of filters other than the html one to allow other filetypes to be indexed. Embedded search in freesites - allowing someone who has uploaded an index to present a box on their site to start searches on it. And importantly, I will be working with infinity0, to integrate the Interdex distributed index system into the search interface and crawling. MikeB
