Re: New module proposal: tracker

[Lennart Poettering <mztabzr 0pointer de>]

On Tue, 18.08.09 21:09, Patryk Zawadzki (patrys pld-linux org) wrote:

> 
> On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 8:57 PM, Lennart Poettering<mztabzr 0pointer de> wrote:
> > (I don't want to create the impression that I am opposed to the idea
> > of a desktop search engine. I actually do believe it makes sense, but
> > really, you need to do a better job selling the specific technology
> > tracker does.)
> 
> Don't think of the RDF store as Google where you enter two words and
> get back top 10 results. Think of it as a database that has all kinds
> of weird relations for different objects. You could ask it for the
> last.fm track that was playing while you were looking at lolcat images
> on the second day od GCDS while chatting with people whose last name
> contained a lowercase "n" :)
> 
> More real life examples:
> 
> - show me all the party pics
> - give me files and data related to gnome bug #123
> - list all the files I received from Lennart during the last week
> (over Jabber, e-mail etc.)

Nice idea, but is this even realistic? How's a UI for this supposed to
look like? I mean, Google is so awesome because you type stuff in a
text field with only a minimal syntax requirements and will spit out
useful stuff.

But how would you expose in the UI a search mask that allows you to
formulate queries like "give me files and data related to gnome bug
#123"? Are you planning to duplicate the bugzilla search form in the
GNOME Search interface? If that's the case, then wooooww, stop right
there!

This reminds me of the story of network service discovery. Back in the
days there was a protocol SLP which was accepted as an RFC and blessed
by all the big players. It allowed you to do searches likes "give me a
list of printers on the third or seventh floor that takes A4 and does
at least 600dpi". Turns out while this idea is generally nice it was
completely unrealistic designing a UI for this and it is incredibly
hard teaching secretaries how to formulate a query in the SLP query
language -- just because they need to find a bloody printer. -- And
then came mDNS/DNS-SD and drasticallly simplified this and became
popular and took over the world.

Again, I am not saying that the whole idea of having semantic search
is stupid. But your use cases above are just lame and
unrealistic. Sorry.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net
http://0pointer.net/lennart/           GnuPG 0x1A015CC4