Forum OpenACS Development: improving search

1: improving search

Posted by Romas Mažeika on 01/03/05 08:35 PM

Hi,
I've happen to use OpenACS site-wide search quite a while in the last days, and I should admit, usability of it could be improved. Here is the list of things that would be nice to have and would make people life easier:
- ability to filter search results by result type (is it a forum posting, or news posting, or maybe chat log, etc.)
- ability to sort results by source (which forum, etc), creation date(if it's forum to sort by first or last posting dates) and by number of responses or comments.
- also advanced search is not really very advanced, it would be nice to be able to set filters for possible results and to make more complicated search queries. Same old Google is nice example.

That's just a few suggestions. I'm not a technical guy myself and can not do these things myself, so it would be really nice if some smart people with a little bit of free time could take a look on it and make some changes to a brighter side of life.

Cheers,
Romas

2: Re: improving search (response to 1)

Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 01/03/05 11:29 PM

Dirk Gomez is working on an RFC for a new search functionality that will work both in Postgres as well as Oracle. I think your feedback is welcome and right to the point and I hope Dirk finds ways on how to include your suggestions.

3: Dirk on Site Wide Search (response to 2)

Posted by Andrew Piskorski on 01/04/05 07:24 AM

Ah, Dirk may be picking up this work again? Excellent. Others may also want to read Dirk's brief Feb. 2004 discussion of some of the serious failings of the existing Oracle Site-Wide-Search package.

4: Re: improving search (response to 1)

Posted by Romas Mažeika on 01/04/05 07:59 AM

I've found more info about topic on Dirk's webpage. It seems that MIT Sloan is backing up this initiative, which is really great. It's interesting when we will have first results.