Re: Gnome Website Search Demo

[Michael Henson <mike axl net>]

On Fri, 2004-07-16 at 00:56 +1000, Jeff Waugh wrote:
>
> We really, really do need a cool indexing/search system for the web site, so
> thanks heaps for looking into it!
> 
> What are the advantages of using plucene over other indexing tools? We have
> namazu installed on the GNOME servers (for use with the mailing lists), and
> there have been vague plans to use htdig (despite its warts) on the website
> at some stage. Using another tool (not packaged by Red Hat for RHEL3) would
> be a maintenance cost -> is a Plucene-based index/search solution worth it?
> 

I haven't really looked over namazu or htdig. I'll check them out
tonight if I have a chance. Since plucene is just a general indexing API
it is really flexible. The way I have it set up now, it maintains
multiple indexes that are particular to the type of content that it is
indexing. So for instance you can choose to index and search across
different fields, depending on what makes sense for your content (Right
now it's just the API docs and the mailing lists). The indexer and front
pages would be there own custom tools unto themselves, so there would
definitely be extra overhead as opposed to a more off the shelf
solution, but I think that better integration is worth it. Essentially
it really just amounts to a group of perl modules that need to be
installed and a number of cron jobs that need to be queued up, so it
really shoulnd't be that much of a maintenence problem.

-- Michael