[pmwiki-users] Complaint department

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Tue, Jun 13, 2006 at 09:04:16AM -0700, pmwiki at 911networks.com wrote:
> I just did a search for (:title, I want to see what other tags 
> where available and got:
> 
> 349 pages found out of 4076 pages searched.
> 
> Pretty much useless, I gave up after 15 pages.
> 
> Could you please change the format of the display to include: 
> (:searchresults fmt=#teasers:) in Site.Search?

Probably not.  I totally understand the frustration with PmWiki's
search results, but fmt=#teasers is the wrong answer.  For one, it
just does a simple include the first four lines of the target page; while
this may be acceptable for many pages, for many others it will
do the wrong thing because the first lines tend to contain
directives and headings that will make the output worse.

But perhaps the issue has come to enough of a head that it's time
for me to go ahead and implement a valid way to excerpt (and possibly
rank) search results, even if it's very suboptimal in a number of
respects.  Most notably, it will be suboptimal in terms of speed --
every task and option we add to searching/page lists makes it
run even slower than it does now.  

I think I need to remind the group that PmWiki is not a search
engine, has never been designed to be a search engine, and I have
no intent to make it one.  My stance on searching continues to be
that if a site wants fast searches with relevance ranking of results
and excerpted text outputs, then get a "real" search engine that is
designed for such tasks and let it index the PmWiki site.  (Bonus:
such an engine can index and search things that aren't wiki pages,
such as attachments or other static pages on the site.)

I should also point out that any author can create a custom search
page on pmwiki.org, it doesn't require me to do it.  For example, 
to have a search page that defaults to fmt=#title for its
output, just create a page that looks something like:

    (:searchbox:)

    (:searchresults fmt=#title order=title:)

See, for example, http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Test/SearchByTitle .
Then use that custom search page for searching instead of the 
PmWiki default.

Still, I'll see if I can write up an {$Excerpt} page variable
in the very near future, as well as an order=rank option.

Pm