2007/10/4, Fabrice Colin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>
> On 10/4/07, Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > 2007/10/4, Fabrice Colin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> > > Some back-ends are able to suggest terms, or do spelling
> > > correction. It would be useful if these capabilities could be
> > > exported by Deskbar handlers/modules.
> >
> > This is not solvable on a global deskbar level. But can be solved by
> > individual modules.
> >
> > In the days before we joined Gnome we did native stemming, but it
> > turned out to be a bottle neck. One of deskbar's prime features are
> > the near-instant searches, and that should be kept as a higher goal
> > than spelling corrections I think.
> >
> We may not be talking about the same thing. I agree that stemming
> is for the back-end engine to handle, and not Deskbar.


I'm quite sure that we are talking about the same thing. Stemming was only
an example of a related technology that we had to remove.

Imagine for instance you want to search for "mikkel" but misspell
> it "mikkal". No results are found, but the engine is able to
> suggest alternative query strings, for instance "mikkel", if this
> term exists in its documents corpus. A feedback mechanism where
> the user is prompted with "Did you mean mikkel ?" would be useful.
> Engines that support this do it rather quickly and it doesn't have
> a noticeable impact on search speed.


I can think of many ways to add such functionality to deskbar. The biggest
problem is presenting it in a non-obtrusive and sensitive way to the user.
Deskbar has a very compact UI - and some users are requesting the previous,
even more compact UI, back. It is hard cramming more info in there, but if
there are good ideas, I'm all ears.


Similarly, as the user types in the query field, it may be
> desirable to suggest terms; for instance, Firefox shows a list
> of suggestions pulled from Google and Yahoo when you type in its
> search bar.


The standard way to do this is via popup, but that will not work for
deskbar. So again - how should such things be displayed?


Is there a way for Deskbar handles/modules to give this kind of
> feedback at the moment ?


Nope, but it should not be rocket science to add (I think).

Cheers,
Mikkel
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