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

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

2007/10/4, Sebastian Pölsterl <marduk k-d-w org>:

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Fabrice Colin schrieb:
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
If you know of a module that supports this feature, could you please
post a link to it? I'm curious how they do it.

This is very hard to do without an index. The standard way to do this is via N-grams extracted

 from the main index and then stored in a second.

> 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.
>
> Is there a way for Deskbar handles/modules to give this kind of
> feedback at the moment ?
>
I myself can't think of any way that to do this with the current
architecture.

I believe Google uses previous successful queries for this. This is more or less equivalent to our history plugin.

When you think of it, the very nature of deskbar is to be a suggestion-popup.


Cheers,
Mikkel