[pmwiki-users] Search box on PmWiki.org

[Roman]

On 1/24/07, Patrick R. Michaud <pmichaud at pobox.com> wrote:
> > 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.

Ranking would be great! That is exactly type of solution you were
talking about ("How can I solve a whole bunch of problems" as opposed
to implementing quick fixes for a single problem.). I think that it
would even solve Sandy's original request better.

FYI, Mateusz Czaplinski has made some ranking extension in his
SortByScore cookbook recipe
(http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/SortByScore.html). Unfortunately,
it does not work on 2.2 (at least on my site), does not prefer titles,
headings etc. and shows excerpt of source code instead of excerpt of
resulting page.

Roman