RE: [docbook-apps] Help needed testing CJK search support in webhelp

["Cramer, David W (David)" <dcramer@motive.com>]

Hi Róbert,
Partial matches may lead to too much noise in the search results, but I think supporting wildcards would be an excellent feature for just the situation you mention. In fact, I kind of wish I'd put it on the original list of requirements for the summer, but I didn't think of it back then :-) 

If Kasun thinks it's easy to add, that would be great, but he still has some other bugs to chase down and some documentation to work on before the deadline this summer, so for now I've added it to the "Future enhancements (GSOC 2011?)" section in the document.

Thanks, 
David

-----Original Message-----
From: Fekete Róbert [mailto:frobert@balabit.com] 
Sent: Friday, August 13, 2010 2:01 AM
To: Kasun Gajasinghe
Cc: =?utf-8?q?Cramer@mail.balabit.hu; Cramer, David W (David); docbook-apps@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: Re: [docbook-apps] Help needed testing CJK search support in webhelp

Hi David and Kasun, 

Thank you very much for your response.

I admit that partial matches might not be needed for everyone. The reason I am asking about them is because I maintain extensive technical documentations (for example, http://www.balabit.com/dl/html/syslog-ng-ose-v3.1-guide-admin-en.html/bk01-toc.html) that are often loaded with parameter and option names that can be similar, or have similar endings, and it would be useful for my users to be able to search for them. We publish our docs in PDF and chunked HTML, and recently also as single-page HTML so that the internal search engine of the browser can scan the whole document, but still I get repeatedly asked for adding search to the chunked html version as well, because this version is much faster to open and navigate, and easier to send links to the relevant sections. Though now that I think of it, adding the TOC page from your work to the single-chunk version could make this easier - I'll give it a try sometime and get back to you.

Thanks again!

Robert


On Thursday, August 12, 2010 17:50 CEST, Kasun Gajasinghe <kasun.gajasinghe@gmail.com> wrote: 
 
> Hi Robert,
> Currently, partial query match is not supported. Our main concern was  
> displaying search results for the root worss in the query(installing - 
>  > install), because that support is highly needed for a search  
> engine. But a little thinking about partial matching suggested that  
> this *might* be possible to do it by some JavaScripting. Have to think  
> it through!
> Wildcard searching is just a extended version of this. It's fine if  
> David plans to put in to the next year, but I'll see what I can do for  
> it.
> 
> And does supporting for searches like 'nstall' is really needed? I  
> think usage of that kind of feature is very less and would not worth  
> the effort we put in to it!
> 
> Regards,
> --Kasun
> 
> Sent from my iPhone
> 
> On 12 Aug 2010, at 08:26 PM, "Cramer, David W (David)" <dcramer@motive.com 
>  > wrote:
> 
> > Hi Robert,
> > Kasun knows more about the details of the stemmer, but I can point  
> > you to the documentation for the porter stemmer we used:
> >
> > http://snowball.tartarus.org/algorithms/porter/stemmer.html
> >
> > Currently, English, French, and German are supported.
> >
> > You are correct search does not support wildcards in searches, and I  
> > don't believe that
> > the algorithm would return results with the same base but different  
> > prefixes (i.e. searching for "inhibit" won't show pages with  
> > "exhibit"), but I think that's normal for any search engine.
> >
> > I'll add "Support wildcards in query string" to the list of future  
> > features. I thought I had added it there already but I see now that  
> > it's not listed.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > David
> >
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Robert Fekete [mailto:frobert@balabit.com]
> > Sent: Thursday, August 12, 2010 7:14 AM
> > To: docbook-apps@lists.oasis-open.org
> > Subject: Re: [docbook-apps] Help needed testing CJK search support  
> > in webhelp
> >
> > Hi David,
> >
> > First of all, thank you for both of you for your work, it looks very  
> > promising!
> > I have a few questions about how search and stemming works:
> > - Is it possible to add partial matches to the search results? For  
> > example, now
> > if you search for install, installing, or installed, the same  
> > results are
> > returned (correctly), because these words all come from install. But  
> > if you
> > don't type the entire word (say, only 'inst'), there aren't any  
> > results.
> > - Am I right that the search engine does prefix-only matches?  
> > (nstall, *nstall,
> > etc. does not work)
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > Robert
> >
> >
> >
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