William Prothero wrote:
> Regarding tagging, searching, etc, I’ve experienced very primitive
> search boxes and they can be extremely primitive. (read useless
> almost). It is very difficult to build a great search system. Google
> has done that. It is possible to get Google to index web pages.
> Perhaps there should be thought given to taking advantage of Google
> search to get the context information that we need from the
> dictionary.
The degree of difficulty in delivering good search results is in
proportion to the conceptual range of queries and the size of the data
being searched.
If we want to provide accurate search results for everything from
"arrayEncode" to "Britney Spears", and do so across billions of Web
pages, best leave that to the pros.
But to search for terms related to LiveCode keywords is a much smaller
problem, both in conceptual scope and index size.
Besdies, with LiveCode we need an embedded search engine, something
small and nimble enough to be usable on any computer even when not
connected to the Internet.
The scripts for indexing and retrieving content isn't the hard part.
The hard part is prioritizing it so it gets done.
Truly great indexing can be a lifetime's work; indeed for many it is.
But our needs are so modest, and our current search so limited, that
even just a non-stemmed full-text index of the current Dictionary, with
extra weight for token names, would satisfy a majority of requests quite
well using data already in hand and reasonably simple scripts.
If we then add crowd-source tags, the index would get ever smarter over
time with minimal scripting effort.
--
Richard Gaskin
LiveCode Community Manager
rich...@livecode.org
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