[pmwiki-users] Search box on PmWiki.org

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Wed Jan 24 11:56:13 CST 2007


On Wed, Jan 24, 2007 at 12:15:25PM -0500, Sandy wrote:
> > I'm also thinking that I may want the default output format
> > to display summaries along with the pagenames, instead of just
> > pagenames as it does now.
> 
> Leave it as an option for the reader. I think they can be confusing.

I've now re-done the search results on pmwiki.org a bit.  
Any matching pages in the PmWiki, Cookbook, PITS, and Site groups
are displayed first (in that order), followed by pages in other 
groups on the wiki (in alphabetical order).

Each matching page has any $:Summary value displayed after it.

See if that improves searching on pmwiki.org for a bit.
I'd also be interested in seeing any proposals for alternate
output templates that we might want to adopt instead.

> For pmwiki.org, maybe pages with titles that include the search term 
> should come first. If I'm looking for "passwords", the pages with that 
> word in them are more useful than ones where someone has said "and 
> remember to set a password".

We might be able to do this.  It sounds a bit like a specialized
pagelist, though, since some pages would end up being listed twice.
Either that or we need to have the default Search page handle
two pagelists -- one for "pages containing search terms in the name" 
and then the normal search results based on page content.

Another possibility would be to put a ranking algorithm on the search 
results, and display the pages in order of best match (like most 
search engines do).  The pagelist code that comes in 2.2.0 has much 
better hooks for this sort of thing.  For example, a simple
word frequency ranking would count the number of times a given
word appears in a page (increasing the weight if the word appears
as a keyword, in a heading, in a description, in a title, or
in the pagename), and then we display the page results
by decreasing rank.

> Isn't there already a page listing the differences? Most of the 
> differences are minor and good examples of how easy it is to customize it.
> 
> Search all of PmWiki.org: (:searchbox:)
> Search PmWiki and Cookbook Groups only: (:searchbox group=pmiki,cookbook:)

This is also possible, but I think we really need the searchbox
in the upper-right to default to the limited form of search as well.
So, probably something more like:

    Search: [xyz_______________________]
    (*) Search documentation, cookbook, and PITS
    ( ) Search all of pmwiki.org

Pm




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