[JDEV] Jabber DevZone News - JabberSearch Enters Beta

[Jabber DevZone]

JabberSearch Enters Beta

The following was posted by justin at jabber.org via the Jabber DevZone web site (http://dev.jabber.org/):

Let me back up here, back in January of this year at the last Jabber
developers meeting up at Ryan Eatmon's place in Dallas, I began
working on a PHP wrapper for the SWISH-E search engine that Jer had
just started setting up.  I got it working before I left, and even set
it up on Jabber.org, but found it to be very weak in comparison to
other engines.  About this time I started thinking about starting a
standalone site with a single index that would power the search for
all the Jabber sites, and allow for searches to be performed on the
same index from any of the sites or from JabberSearch itself.  I began
to search for some other search engines and came up with mnoGoSearch
after seeing it over at MySQL.com.



I installed mnoGoSearch and played around with it for a little while,
but I felt limited by it as well.  I did liked the fact that it stored
its index in a database, and that it had built-in PHP functionality,
but these features alone didn't quite compare the the general weakness
of the search engine itself.  I'm looking for Google in a box here,
and nothing's coming close!



Upon more research I remember ht://dig. It's a great little search
engine, a bit old and rusty, but it functions.  After I set it up I
was pleased with the results, especially the page excerpts for
matching documents, and decided it would hold up to the task of
creating JabberSearch.  So I spent about 3 days implementing it,
writing some custom templates that I could parse using PHP, then
gaining some sense and changing the templates to XML.  I put together
a rudimentary XML parser and everything was working great, well, until
my idle-normally-reading-the-latest-news-on-the-web time brought me to
our next search engine!  I never thought I'd get this much experience
with search engines software, nor was I ever planning on making this
much work for myself...



Enter ASPSeek...  Wow... I can't possibly say enough good things about
this search engine.  It's the apex of user-installable search engines,
the Jabber of functionality, and the Linux of price and performance. 
It's my Google-in-a-box.  I'm still amazed at how wonderful it is.....
Oh I'm sorry, here is a towel to wipe up my drool, I hope I didn't
damage your keyboard.  Anyways, so I set up ASPSeek, was very
impressed, found some bugs, requested some features, and get this...
got some actual interaction with the developers!  Wow!  I like!  If
you need a search engine, there is nothing better than ASPSeek:
http://www.aspseek.org/  (I'm trying to get them to implement native
XML output capabilities...)



So, the
definitive-all-comprehensive-and-hopefully-widely-used-but-not-too-bandwidth-hogging-since-it's-currently-on-a-limited-bandwidth-box
(gasp) JabberSearch has reached beta status!



JabberSearch is currently indexing just over 15,000 pages across 6 web
sites.  Both the site frontend and backend require a lot of work yet,
but the search facilities are functional.  My decision to announce is
based on the fact that the recent Jabber.com survey and numerous
mailing list posts demand a good search engine.  Like most of the cool
software currently out there, this is work in progress and may break
at any time.



For the next week or so JabberSearch will be in beta testing.  Once
I'm confident that all the showstoppers are ironed out and the site
design is finished then it'll go live for real.  Once this happens,
JabberCentral, Jabber.org, Jabber DevZone, the Jabber Docs Site, the
Jabber Mailing List Archives, and a couple other sites will be powered
by JabberSearch directly.  In the future, the database will be open
for anyone to use and query locally on their own sites or
applications, by way of XML-formatted search results.  I've got some
cool ideas cooking in my head, but first things first.



So pull up a web browser and walk, don't run, over to
http://www.jabbersearch.org/ and find those bugs! When (I say this
because I'm sure you will) you find bugs, or if you have any comments
or [de]constructive criticism, you can e-mail me or jabber me at
justin at jabber.org.  At least I think you can e-mail me there, I've
never tried it really.  Just reply to this one to be sure :)



Go easy, and be sure to heed to the practitioner's warning! Enjoy!



Justin Mecham

JabberCentral Network Manager

http://www.jabbercentral.org/



http://jabber.org/?oid=1317