> This is a message I received yesterday regarding possible work to the
> PHP site's search functionality. The author has a history of search
> tech work and makes some good points, and I tend to agree with him that
> the PHP site's searching could use some work. Anyway, I don't have time
> at the moment to deal with this and I don't work on the site anyway,
> so I'm throwing it out there for discussion.
>
> Thoughts?
Well, nice idea, but who has the time to implement this.
BTW it would be better to also include [EMAIL PROTECTED]
in the "To: field", so webmasters can also answer this (done).
Stig also volunteered some time ago to set up a central
search server for us at FastSerch, so we can direct all
search queries to a common place, and so all sites can
do much better searches... But nothing really happened
in this field...
Goba
> -----Forwarded Message-----
>
> > From: J. Scott Johnson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> > Subject: Suggestion for Improving Search at PHP.NET
> > Date: 17 Mar 2002 11:50:56 -0500
> >
> > Hi Torben,
> >
> > I wasn't sure who to send this to but since I have talked to you at
least
> > once and I know you have some relationship to the documentation, I
thought
> > I'd send it to you. Sorry if its a bother or off point for you.
> >
> > I'm (fairly rapidly) climbing the learning curve for PHP and what I am
> > finding is that my search queries often don't easily match up to
functions
> > in the manual. For example I searched for "writing to start of file"
(no
> > quotes) and got a fairly arcane set of responses including one on
writing
> > PDFs. While this is algorithmically correct from the indexer's
perspective,
> > from a person's perspective it actually isn't. I'd wager that people
use
> > the PDF writing abilities rarely as compared to simply writing text
files
> > and the like.
> >
> > My experience has been that if you analyze your http logs, you could
extract
> > the search entries and probably find that a large number of searches are
> > actually a relatively small number of common queries. For any language,
its
> > always the same issues -- writing files, strings, etc. One way to
improve
> > this is to use a query preprocessor to add a level of human intelligence
to
> > your search. This works well when you have a fairly constant url
structure.
> > What you do is manually map queries to pages and then change your result
> > list to be a two tier hierarchy (Human Answers and Documents). Thus,
your
> > results page becomes something like this:
> >
> > For your search, {insert query here}, we found:
> >
> > Human Recommended Answers
> > a.. search result
> > b.. search result
> > Documents We Found:
> > a.. search result
> > b.. search result
> > To make this a lot easier, get the users of the site to contribute back
> > their problems and the webpage which answered it. I suspect the user
> > community would be happy to help.
> >
> > Note I have a pretty serious background (10 + years) in search and
retrieval
> > http://www.fuzzygroup.com/about/sjohnsonresume.htm . I do know what I
am
> > talking about here. This is actually pretty much the technique used by
> > AskJeeves (which I don't like as a general tool but does work quite well
in
> > focused knowledge domains such as a language).
> >
> > If I can help at all with this, happy to...
> >
> > Scott
> > J. Scott Johnson
> >
> > Physical
> > * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
> > 80 Spring Road
> > Nahant, MA 01908
> >
> > Phone:
> > * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
> > 781 592 0262 - home
> > 617 970 4719 - cell
> >
> > Virtual:
> > * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
> > [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> > http://www.fuzzygroup.com/
> > Yahoo IM: fuzzygroup
> >
> >
>
>
