On Wed, 17 May 2000, Jeremy Howard wrote:
> > I just wrote a very simple SQL based engine - so I would say I'm happy
> > with that. It's fast and it's all in perl. I could very simply rip out the
> > search parts of the code for someone to play with if they wanted to.
> Sounds good. Personally, I'd rather a simple engine we can fiddle with
> ourselves than a big system written in C. Does your engine generate a
> database from flat files? Is there some basic parameterisation (a
> 'stop list' for common words, definable 'keyword' characters, ...)?
Well it's just perl, so there's a separate word tokenizer, a separate db
inserter and a separate searcher (which is split into query parser and SQL
builder). The db inserter is aware of "ignore words" which are stored in
the DB.
> > I think word highlighting is overrated. It's only necessary in this case
> > because the guide is so damn huge now. The size problem could be
> > eliminated by making the guide split itself up into smaller sections. My
> > proposal would be to do that by converting the guide to docbookXML and use
> > AxKit to display the resulting docbook pages. The AxKit docbook
> > stylesheets are nice and friendly, and written in Perl, not some obscure
> > XML stylesheet language. And after all that, it would make converting the
> > guide to a format O'Reilly likes to publish (i.e. docbook), trivial.
> Your word highlighting statement is, I suspect, controversial. On the
> other hand, converting to docbook is unlikely to meet much resistance
> from users--as long as Stas doesn't mind maintaining it!... To get the
> best of both worlds, why not simply chain the search engine result
> through a filter that does the highlighting. I bet someone's written
> such a filter already--anyone?
> > > My only concern is that it seems a little odd to keep this just to the
> > > Guide. Wouldn't it be useful for the rest of perl.apache.org? I
> > > wouldn't have thought it's much extra work to add a drop-down box to
> > > search specific areas of the sight (the Guide being one)...
> >
> > perl.apache.org already has a search engine.
>
> So I've heard, but:
> * Where is it? (doing a Find on the front page doesn't show it)
At the bottom of all guide pages.
> * Does it do highlighting?
No.
> * Can you select a subset of the site? (e.g. just the Guide)
No.
--
<Matt/>
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