[JDEV] [jadmin] The Road to JabberSearch (BETA!)

[Justin Mecham]

Here I am, after quite possibly 4 months of "I'm really going to get this
thing done. Serious! For sure next week! Really!" I've decided that the best
motivation for getting JabberSearch completed and rock solid, is actual user
input and complaints that this and that feature doesn't work like it should!
=]

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/

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