Fedora Search

[John (J5) Palmieri]

On Wed, 2008-01-30 at 13:21 -0500, Luke Macken wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 30, 2008 at 11:57:23AM -0600, Mike McGrath wrote:
> > We need a Fedora search engine.  Especially for docs.  Options
> > 
> > 1) Do we run our own?
> > 
> > 2) Do we use google.
> > 
> > I love 2, its easy.  But it is, non-OSS.  So there are moral issues at
> > stake here.  (though I've not used google to exclusively search through
> > our sites, it may suck at it, who knows :)
> > 
> > So, thoughts?  Who has deployed their own search engines?  I've used htdig
> > in the past.
> 
> I know J5 has been working on a search controller for MyFedora, which
> will be responsible for scouring a bunch of our resources.  I don't see
> why we wouldn't be able to search docs as well.
> 
> luke
> 

So search is on my F10 schedule.  It would be it's own service with a
pluggable backend which could farm out searches based on context (wiki,
packages, web, etc.) and also give secondary searches (such as querying
google).  The plugins could start out simple such as searching for
package names (I already have this implemented via koji).  For a more
full search we would need to model our search criteria (what are our
users really searching for?) replicate data from our resources and index
them based on the model's relationships.  I'm in a meeting right now
finding out about MetaMatrix which is slated to be open sourced at some
point.  It can pull data from different data sources (XML, SQL, etc.)
and put them into common views (simple explanation).  Might be good to
use.

-- 
John (J5) Palmieri <johnp at redhat.com>