[Fwd: Re: GNOME and advanced search indexes viability]



David Wheeler wrote:

I have a few comments about the advanced search idea:
* It'd be good if it could also support "searching through system
documentation" (e.g., man pages, info pages, etc.).

Contemplated. Perhaps not in the initial version, but a plug-in would be easy to write and subsequent releases might include them. The thing is how to integrate those with the UI, remembering that the UI should show the user any kind of information, but bottom-line associative data is pathname. That means that there has to be an application that's directly associated to man or info pages. So that you double-click on a man page in your file manager OR search results window, and an application opens up.

* It'd be good if it could be accessed as an (internal) web page,
  and returned URL links that could be followed.  That way, it'd be
  easy to integrate into different browsers, and queries could be
easily generated by application programs.

We have it planned. This can be done by remapping file:// paths to http:// paths, so long as the file is already shared by Apache or the installed Web server. But I think that the biggest boon won't be a Web application to search files, but a *CMS* which queries the index for quick results instead of searching the files itself. So I see CMS builders as piggybacking on our technology


* It should support multiple document formats.

Naturally.  The point of this is to drive consumer adoption and ISV support.

So what do you think? Do you see potential customers for a corporate edition or mass adoption of the open-source edition possible? What I keep racking my brains about is that I need a *real* customer which is willing to negotiate and buy or license the technology from us, for this to be a viable project (so I can assign real manpower, and project costs/timetables around it).





--- David A. Wheeler
    dwheeler ida org







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