Forum OpenACS Development: Re: Need help with Site-wide-search and search packages

4: Re: Need help with Site-wide-search and search packages (response to 1)

Posted by Dirk Gomez on 02/18/04 06:35 PM

I worked on this version of the site-wide-search package about 2 years ago and it was very broken especially if you added more than a couple of dozen rows.

I recently played with search for Oracle again. See the results here: OpenACS Search proposal. Development is on hold till I get at least some funding.

5: Re: Need help with Site-wide-search and search packages (response to 4)

Posted by Alejandro Beya on 02/18/04 07:06 PM

Hi Dirk! I was just about to send you and e-mail! I have been searching information about this issue and I came up with your OpenACS Search proposal. I found it very interesting. I was wondering if, since you wrote that, you had advanced work or if you knew someone who had finished porting to OpenACS 5 this package. This package is so important for Project/Knowledge that if we don't find the package for OpenACS 5 with Oracle, we will port it ourselves from OpenACS 4.x We wanted first to ask the community if this was done so we could save time. Dirk, greetings from Frank. Bests, Alejandro Beya alejandro.beya@project-open.com http://www.project-open.com/knowledge/

6: Re: Need help with Site-wide-search and search packages (response to 5)

Posted by Dirk Gomez on 02/19/04 07:19 PM

I doubt you'll find the code useful. It requires short urls, central package_ids etc all of which is available on the site I was developping against.

Your best bet is to take ACES' site-wide-search which is imho the best freely availabe OpenACS/ACS site-wide-search implementation and port it to OpenACS5.

7: Re: Need help with Site-wide-search and search packages (response to 6)

Posted by Andrew Piskorski on 02/19/04 11:21 PM

Dirk, you're saying the ACES site-wide-search package is substantially better than the Oracle site-wide-search currently in OpenACS CVS, and we should port it to OpenACS 5.x? Can you give us more info on why that is, and how that situation came to be?

8: Re: Need help with Site-wide-search and search packages (response to 7)

Posted by Dirk Gomez on 02/23/04 10:47 PM

The code in the repository was the basis for site-wide search on the ShareNet
project and I recently talked to the guy who was the lead developer on this
and his comment was: "To save time you better start from scratch".

Here's the bit that I experienced (I worked on it as well):

* Its performance with real-life amount of data was simply awful.

* It didn't work with umlauts.

* It has a lot of weird, weird code like if's that are always true, dynamic
ddl, abstraction layers etc.

Given that no-one has worked on it for more than two years it should be even
more useless to use it. E.g. it still indexes the forums packages which has
been deprecated a long time ago.

The ACES solution is the ACS3 solution which has worked in this way or another
on many ACS-backed sites, I worked about two years with it and I find it
pretty reasonable, so I think it is sound approach to port it.

9: Re: Need help with Site-wide-search and search packages (response to 4)

Posted by Don Baccus on 03/06/04 04:13 PM

"Site-wide search is the king of all packages.
The Goal

The goal is to to implement a well-performing and feature-rich site-wide-search solution for OpenACS based on Oracle Intermedia (or Oracle Text for the 9i people)"

So the king of all packages will be Oracle-only?

We need a search solution that works for both RDBMS's, which implies an approach similar to the non-Oracle search package ... separation of search UI and search engine.

10: Re: Need help with Site-wide-search and search packages (response to 9)

Posted by Dirk Gomez on 03/06/04 05:09 PM

My proposal would be portable to PostgreSQL without much trouble and is based to large part on things like acs_objects.name et al.

But (as posted here or somewhere else on openacs.org): Work is on hold anyway.

13: Re: Need help with Site-wide-search and search packages (response to 9)

Posted by Andrew Piskorski on 03/07/04 08:19 AM

Don, OpenACS isn't, but AIESEC.net definitely is Oracle-only, right?

From reading it, Dirk's title on that working paper, "... specifically in AIESEC.NET", is accurate but the description he gave when linking to it above, "OpenACS Search proposal", definitely is not. It is only about AIESEC's website, and is very brief even on that; it doesn't really touch on the bigger OpenACS-in-general picture at all.

Dirk, it would be quite useful if you could extend that paper into a "Site-Wide Search in AIESEC.NET, and in OpenACS in general" proposal, with compare and contrast between AIESEC and OpenACS, practical lessons learned from AIESEC and/or other live sites, etc.