On Wed, 2009-04-08 at 11:52 +0300, Nadav Har'El wrote: > On Sun, Apr 05, 2009, Omer Zak wrote about "Re: Recommendations for desktop > search tool under Linux": > > > - Linux command line tools like locate, grep, find, vi and probably a > > > few good other "dinosaurs" which I left out of the list. They do what > >... > > I use those "traditional" command line tools, too. > > > > The problem is that they are very slow when I want to search significant > > parts of my PC's filesystem. Therefore I need a search tool which I > > would expect to index the information for easier subsequent retrieval. > > See above for my not minding the space taken up by those index files. > > The "traditional" command-line solution for that was glimpse (see > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GLIMPSE), which created in advance relatively- > small indexes which help narrow down the search to matching files (or group > of files) which are then "grep"ed normally. This yielded an interesting > combination of very small indexes (a few percent of the original data size) > and acceptable search speeds (seconds, not minutes). > > Glimpse is rather old by now (15 years old, actually...), but the ideas > behind it are still quite sound and interesting. Udi Manber, the person who > wrote Glimpse, later moved to Yahoo, and then moved to Amazon and finally > to Google (the black whole which apparently nobody leaves ;-)).
Very interesting solution. I do not care about index sizes, but I value very much a search tool, which would be tolerant to misspellings. The Web site at http://webglimpse.net/ has a link to partial Hebrew translation. They promise a free commercial license to people who translate at least 5 pages into an as-yet unsupported language. Is there any interest in an equivalent Free Software project? I also wonder whether it is possible to use plugins of existing search tools (such as Beagle) as front-ends for accessing non-"text/plain" documents. Happy Passover, --- Omer -- Delay is the deadliest form of denial. C. Northcote Parkinson My own blog is at http://www.zak.co.il/tddpirate/ My opinions, as expressed in this E-mail message, are mine alone. They do not represent the official policy of any organization with which I may be affiliated in any way. WARNING TO SPAMMERS: at http://www.zak.co.il/spamwarning.html _______________________________________________ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
