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

["Fabrice Colin" <fabrice colin gmail com>]

On 10/5/07, Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen <mikkel kamstrup gmail com> wrote:
> 2007/10/4, Fabrice Colin <fabrice colin gmail com>:
> > 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.
>
Right... Hopefully this will not be removed once implemented ;-)

> > 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.
>
I am no UI expert, so bear with me :-) How about showing alternative
spelling suggestions on top of the results list ? It would look like

Search: X
Spelling suggestions
 "Did you mean Y ?"
Web Search
 Search Amazon.com for X
...

Clicking on "Did you mean Y ?" would then set the text entry field to
Y and run the search as if it had been entered by the user.

Search term suggestions could also be shown in the same list while
the user types :

Search: comp
Search suggestions
 compulink
 compulsory
 computador
 computer
 computing
...

I don't know if this is compatible with the ideas you guys have for
Deskbar. I am not up to date on new developments, I still use 2.19.3
here.

Fabrice