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

["Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen" <mikkel kamstrup gmail com>]

2007/10/4, Fabrice Colin <fabrice colin gmail com>:

On 10/4/07, Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen <mikkel kamstrup gmail com> wrote:
> 2007/10/4, Fabrice Colin <fabrice colin gmail com >:
> > Some back-ends are able to suggest terms, or do spelling
> > correction. It would be useful if these capabilities could be
> > exported by Deskbar handlers/modules.
>
> This is not solvable on a global deskbar level. But can be solved by
> individual modules.
>
> In the days before we joined Gnome we did native stemming, but it
> turned out to be a bottle neck. One of deskbar's prime features are
> the near-instant searches, and that should be kept as a higher goal
> than spelling corrections I think.
>
We may not be talking about the same thing. I agree that stemming
is for the back-end engine to handle, and not Deskbar.

I'm quite sure that we are talking about the same thing. Stemming was only an example of a related technology that we had to remove.

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.

I can think of many ways to add such functionality to deskbar. The biggest problem is presenting it in a non-obtrusive and sensitive way to the user. Deskbar has a very compact UI - and some users are requesting the previous, even more compact UI, back. It is hard cramming more info in there, but if there are good ideas, I'm all ears.
 

Similarly, as the user types in the query field, it may be
desirable to suggest terms; for instance, Firefox shows a list
of suggestions pulled from Google and Yahoo when you type in its
search bar.

The standard way to do this is via popup, but that will not work for deskbar. So again - how should such things be displayed?
 

Is there a way for Deskbar handles/modules to give this kind of
feedback at the moment ?

Nope, but it should not be rocket science to add (I think).

Cheers,
Mikkel