Re: [Deskbar] Levenstein, Typo correction, Sorting items by usage

[Nils <n bruenggel gmail com>]

> Imagine for instance you want to search for "mikkel" but misspell
> it "mikkal". No results are found, but the engine is able to
> suggest alternative query strings, for instance "mikkel", if this
> term exists in its documents corpus. A feedback mechanism where
> the user is prompted with "Did you mean mikkel ?" would be useful.
> Engines that support this do it rather quickly and it doesn't have
> a noticeable impact on search speed.


That's not exactly what i meant. I used quicksilver some time ago on
OSX and as far as I remember it did the following: It showed up the
items matching the input, sorted by the levenstein distance (the one
with the shortest distance first) and by usage (the most used items
first). This means that you could call "Firefox", for example "foxy",
since there is some similarity between the 2 strings. If you always
choose Firefox, when typing "foxy", it learns, so Firefox will move on
the top of the menu. It also reacted quick, but I'm not sure what
algorithms were used, I also think it's not opensource (but free of
charge).

Another thing which I found rather disappointed on Deskbar was, that
it does not recognize if a program needs to run in a shell. Eg uname,
ssh somewhere.com, etc does not work. I don't have an idea right now,
how Deskbar should know if a program needs to run in a shell or not
(ok you could just use a list of UNIX commands..) But a launcher for
Linux should support this IMHO :-)

NIls