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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>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!
=]</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>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.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>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!</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>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...</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>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: <A
href="http://www.aspseek.org/">http://www.aspseek.org/</A> (I'm trying to
get them to implement native XML output capabilities...)</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>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!</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>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.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>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.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>So pull up a web browser and walk, don't run, over
to <A href="http://www.jabbersearch.org/">http://www.jabbersearch.org/</A> 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 <A
href="mailto:justin@jabber.org">justin@jabber.org</A>. At least I think
you can e-mail me there, I've never tried it really. Just reply to
this one to be sure :)</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Go easy, and be sure to heed to the practitioner's
warning! Enjoy!</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Justin Mecham</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>JabberCentral Network Manager</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2><A
href="http://www.jabbercentral.org/">http://www.jabbercentral.org/</A></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>