[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Christopher Hicks) writes: > Browsing and searching each have their place. It is conceivable that > a powerful enough search could emulate browsing.
It is not only conceivable, but it's something I've spent several months achieving! > fond of browsing than searching. It may only be 10% of the cases > where browsing works better than searching, but if I want to answer > the question - "what are all of the perl web applications" it would > take lots of searches and result munging to find out what a painless > browse could produce. No, no, no. This is simply not true. Please, let's think this through. To have a browse interface which can tell you that certain things are Perl web applications, there must somewhere be some metadata which tells you that module X is a Perl web application. If you have some metadata, you can index it. If you can index it, you can search on it. If you do the one single, simple search '+category:"Perl web application"' or whatever, you get a list of all the web applications. No multiple searches. No munging the result sets. It really is that easy. Repeat after me: browsing is just searching metadata. -- A booming voice says, "Wrong, cretin!", and you notice that you have turned into a pile of dust.
