Re: [Tracker] Syntax of searchings

["Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen" <mikkel kamstrup gmail com>]

2006/11/15, Laurent Aguerreche <laurent aguerreche free fr>:

Le mercredi 15 novembre 2006 à 18:05 +0100, Javier Arantegui a écrit :
> Hi,
>
> I have several documents where appear "Ziegler-Nichols". I can find
> the documents searching for "ziegler-nichols" but I cannot find
> anything if I look for "ziegler" or "nichols".  Is there any way to
> find them looking for "Ziegler"?
>
> I'm using the tracker-search-tool (0.5.1) and tracker (0.5.1 )

Currently it is not possible and it is not normal... I do not know if
QDBM (which stores file names associated with keywords) can be set to
split string like "ziegler-nichols" into "ziegler" and "nichols"
automatically for searching or if we need to split strings ourselves.

What I also dislike with libstemmer (which aims to "reduce" strings to
radicals to ignore plural for instance) is that it does not ignore
accentuated characters, so if I have a file which contains "éléphant",
then "élephant" or "elephant" will not be found. "éléphant" is the
correct orthography but it happens very often that french people miss
some accents or add superflus ones... and it is the same problem in
other languages.

I think the "correct" solution would be to also index a normalized version of each string - possible breaking the original string into smaller bits ("ziegler-nichols" -> "ziegler" and "nichols"). This normalized form should probably consist of only the 25 english letters.

This whole transliteration business is actually quite complex. Fx. in danish there is the diacritic mark "ø" (which technically speaking might not be me a real diacritic) - mapping this to the english 25 letter system would be "oe", however in online context it is very normal to just use "o".

In a perfect world the word "øre" would be searchable as "øre", "oere" and "ore", with results sorted after closest match - the real word "øre" would rank higher than "oere".

I have no idea on what google, beagle, spotlight does with this... let alone how this fit into Tracker...

Cheers,
Mikkel