Post in Search Prototype

2007 Jul 04 02:44 UTC

Hi, all! I would like to announce the alpha-release of post-searching.
http://groupserver.org/groups/development/search_prototype/index.html?viewTopics=0&viewPosts=1&viewFiles=0&viewProfiles=0

Like topics and files, the posts returned by the searches are ordered by time,
as generally more recent information is the more useful information (just like
news). The data retuned by the search is much the same as you would see on the
latest posts page for a group, such as the one GroupServer Development
  http://groupserver.org/groups/development/messages/posts.html
However, I have also added a snippet from the body of the post. The snippet is
either the first line of the post, or the first line that matches the search
string
http://groupserver.org/groups/development/search_prototype/index.html?searchText=search&viewTopics=0&viewPosts=1&viewFiles=0&viewProfiles=0

Currently the posts are grouped in “chunks” of six, but this will probably be
raised in a subsequent release. What it will be raised to is something that I
am still trying to decide, but for now you can alter the chunk-size by playing
around with the "limit" argument to the search:
http://groupserver.org/groups/development/search_prototype/index.html?searchText=search&viewTopics=0&viewPosts=1&viewFiles=0&viewProfiles=0&limit=12
http://groupserver.org/groups/development/search_prototype/index.html?searchText=search&viewTopics=0&viewPosts=1&viewFiles=0&viewProfiles=0&limit=24
http://groupserver.org/groups/development/search_prototype/index.html?searchText=search&viewTopics=0&viewPosts=1&viewFiles=0&viewProfiles=0&limit=48
http://groupserver.org/groups/development/search_prototype/index.html?searchText=search&viewTopics=0&viewPosts=1&viewFiles=0&viewProfiles=0&limit=96
What would you like it set to?

Like most search engines, post-search supports “phrase searching”, where a
number of words can be grouped together to form a phrase, such as "disabling
delivery"
http://groupserver.org/groups/development/search_prototype/index.html?searchText=%22disabling+delivery%22&viewTopics=0&viewPosts=1&viewFiles=0&viewProfiles=0
Be warned, using phrases slows down the search: you are usually better off
searching for separate words
http://groupserver.org/groups/development/search_prototype/index.html?searchText=unsubscribe+leave&viewTopics=0&viewPosts=1&viewFiles=0&viewProfiles=0

Unlike most searches, we provide a system for altering the parameters of the
search to particular values: parametric search. For posts, the results can be
restricted to a particular group or author. Rather than provide a lists of all
visible groups, I created an interface that allows you to refine the results
based on the posts that have been returned. For example, if you click on
  ▶ Refine
under the last post in the above example, you will see the link
  Show only posts by Michael JasonSmith
Clicking on this will display the following page
http://groupserver.org/groups/development/search_prototype/index.html?searchText=unsubscribe%20leave&authorId=michaeljasonsmith&viewTopics=0&viewPosts=1&viewFiles=0&viewProfiles=0
Which is all the posts that I have written, on GroupServer.Org, that contain
the words "unsubscribe" or "leave". You can perform similar refinement for
posts in groups:
  * All posts in GroupServer Development
http://groupserver.org/groups/development/search_prototype/index.html?groupId=development&viewTopics=0&viewPosts=1&viewFiles=0&viewProfiles=0
  * All posts in GroupServer Development written by Steven Clift
http://groupserver.org/groups/development/search_prototype/index.html?groupId=development&authorId=stevenc&viewTopics=0&viewPosts=1&viewFiles=0&viewProfiles=0
The parametric-search is our greatest departure from the norm, when it comes to
searching, so I would really appreciate feedback on it.

There are a few things that I have not done (yet). I hope to have these done by
the end of the week, unless something gets in my way.
  1. The style of the page is pretty ugly. All the "span" and "div"
     elements are there, with class attributes set, but I have not
     had time to apply the styles to the page.
  2. I do not have an ATOM feed of the post-search. The idea is to
     allow users to subscribe to a Web feed of a particular search,
     such as all posts by me, or all posts in a particular group
     that contain the words "governor".
  3. I have not made a view of the results that uses a table, or
     list, to structure the page.

Future feature enhancements that I am thinking about — but doubt that I will
get around to implementing — are stemming and ordering the posts by something
other than date.

Stemming is the process of determining the root of a word, such as “post” for
“posting” or “posted”. A search that used stemming would return more results
than one that did not. However, it would require a significant amount of work
to add stemming to our system, and we have bigger fish to fry ☺

It would be nice to allow the user to order the results by something other than
time, such as the relevancy score of the post or topic. However, with the
ability to refine the results by author and group, the need to reorder the
results should be reduced.