xapian

doc/todo/different_search_engine.mdwn

@@ -3,8 +3,14 @@ the [[plugins/search]] plugin, is not robust enough for ikiwiki. It doesn't
 upgrade well, and it has a habit of sig-11 on certian input from time to
 time.
 
-So some other engine should be found and used instead. Enrico had one that
-he was using for debtags stuff that looked pretty good.
+So some other engine should be found and used instead. 
+
+Enrico had one that he was using for debtags stuff that looked pretty good.
+That was [Xapian](http://www.xapian.org/), which has perl bindings in
+libsearch-xapian-perl. The nice thing about xapian is that it does a ranked
+search so it understands what words are most important in a search. (So
+does Lucene..) Another nice thing is it supports "more documents like this
+one" kind of search. --[[Joey]]
 
 >> I've done a bit of prototyping on this. The current hip search library is [Lucene](http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/). There's a Perl port called [Plucene](http://search.cpan.org/~tmtm/Plucene-1.25/). Given that it's already packaged, as `libplucene-perl`, I assumed it would be a good starting point. I've written a **very rough** patch against `IkiWiki/Plugin/search.pm` to handle the indexing side (there's no facility to view the results yet, although I have a command-line interface working). That's below, and should apply to SVN trunk.
 
@@ -17,6 +23,10 @@ he was using for debtags stuff that looked pretty good.
 
 >> If this seems a sensible approach, I'll write the CGI interface, and clean up the plugin. -- Ben
 
+>>> The weird thing about lucene is that these are all reimplmentations of
+>>> it. Thank you java.. The C++ version seems like a better choice to me
+>>> (packages are trivial). --[[Joey]]
+
 <pre>
 Index: IkiWiki/Plugin/search.pm
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