I am
developing
an XML-RPC interface to site-wide-search of any website, in
particular, an AOLserver/Tcl based website.
I encourage you to visit my demonstrator and leave comments: is this
useful, how you might change it, etc. I'll try to package the code
up sometime this week, but if you give me encouragement, well that
will make packaging that much easier to do.
The goal is to create a module
for the ACS that would let any site call over to an ACS site and ask
that ACS site to "search itself" for something. In the long run, I
would hope that would yield better results than a Google search of the
site, and it might expose to the searcher, closed off portions of the
site.
The other use would be to let cooperating community sites (that
is, different websites) integrate a little bit more. If you've ever
used Michael
Cleverly's Community Uber-search, well, this is the kind of
service I want to provide, but a bit better. Michael has a crawler up
and when you type in your search words, and designate which
AOLserver/ACS/Tcl/Postgres sites to search, it goes out and searches
each of them. It's wonderfully useful.
My notion is that any site, regardless of the technology it was
built, could have a module that lets collaborating sites register with
each other and so allows each site to have a service that lets its
members perform an ubersearch of a wider community. Communities would
be self-defined: ACSers, XML-RPC Soapers (or here too, or even collaborating
groups of folks interested in Satanic cult best practices). By turning
this into an xml-rpc service, it allows each site to implement it's
own search strategy, and it keeps various sites from having to
replicate crawlers and indexes of all the sites. In general, it should
make ubercommunity searches much easier to implement, and much more
easier and flexible over time to administer.
