Re: Searching for applications

[Milan Bouchet-Valat <nalimilan club fr>]

Le dimanche 12 décembre 2010 à 18:03 -0800, Dylan McCall a écrit :
> One solution is a standard field for Keywords, which could make a bit
> of sense. The really dumb thing now is application developers write
> their comments not to be helpful, but to fit as many searchable key
> words as they possible can. Keywords would fix that, so the Comment
> field could actually be used sensibly again. Unfortunately, that
> solution still keeps us with different applications describing
> themselves differently. F-Spot might have a “camera” keyword while
> Cheese may have “webcam.” Repeat for each locale. Pretty high
> maintenance.
What "high maintenance"? With a Keywords field, each app should just list
the main words that come to mind when looking for it, there aren't hundreds
of them: photo, photos, camera, cameras, possibly manager, album, gallery.

As s translators, we do more painful things than correctly translating
this kind of list and check there are no language specifics to add. A
translator comment explaining this is enough.

Sure, stemming would make the list less ridiculous, but one would have
to find an algorithm that works for all languages and doesn't take too
much processing power (e.g. doesn't walk over the full dictionary).
Porter's could be a good candidate as it's available as free software in
Snowball[1]. But is it worth the result?

> The categories in the desktop entry spec aren't bad. They have to be
> kept up to date (new types of apps may not have categories), but that
> isn't a disaster. F-Spot has “Graphics;Photography;GNOME;GTK;”. So,
> maybe this can be improved by populating search using the categories.
> Note that this can't be a direct one-to-one thing, especially because
> lots of categories have camel case names, like ContactManagement.
> Instead, maybe a particular category should map to a set of synonyms
> that are maintained somewhere central.
Showing a category would be confusing: for now, we only show individual
apps. We could show the list of apps that are in a category that matches
the keyword, but apps can as well add "photography" as a keyword: that's
more flexible and hasn't real drawbacks.

Regards


1: http://snowball.tartarus.org/