Hi folks,
This is a message I received yesterday regarding possible work to the
PHP site's search functionality. The author has a history of search
tech work and makes some good points, and I tend to agree with him that
the PHP site's searching could use some work. Anyway, I don't have time
at the moment to deal with this and I don't work on the site anyway,
so I'm throwing it out there for discussion.
Thoughts?
Torben
-----Forwarded Message-----
> From: J. Scott Johnson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Suggestion for Improving Search at PHP.NET
> Date: 17 Mar 2002 11:50:56 -0500
>
> Hi Torben,
>
> I wasn't sure who to send this to but since I have talked to you at least
> once and I know you have some relationship to the documentation, I thought
> I'd send it to you. Sorry if its a bother or off point for you.
>
> I'm (fairly rapidly) climbing the learning curve for PHP and what I am
> finding is that my search queries often don't easily match up to functions
> in the manual. For example I searched for "writing to start of file" (no
> quotes) and got a fairly arcane set of responses including one on writing
> PDFs. While this is algorithmically correct from the indexer's perspective,
> from a person's perspective it actually isn't. I'd wager that people use
> the PDF writing abilities rarely as compared to simply writing text files
> and the like.
>
> My experience has been that if you analyze your http logs, you could extract
> the search entries and probably find that a large number of searches are
> actually a relatively small number of common queries. For any language, its
> always the same issues -- writing files, strings, etc. One way to improve
> this is to use a query preprocessor to add a level of human intelligence to
> your search. This works well when you have a fairly constant url structure.
> What you do is manually map queries to pages and then change your result
> list to be a two tier hierarchy (Human Answers and Documents). Thus, your
> results page becomes something like this:
>
> For your search, {insert query here}, we found:
>
> Human Recommended Answers
> a.. search result
> b.. search result
> Documents We Found:
> a.. search result
> b.. search result
> To make this a lot easier, get the users of the site to contribute back
> their problems and the webpage which answered it. I suspect the user
> community would be happy to help.
>
> Note I have a pretty serious background (10 + years) in search and retrieval
> http://www.fuzzygroup.com/about/sjohnsonresume.htm . I do know what I am
> talking about here. This is actually pretty much the technique used by
> AskJeeves (which I don't like as a general tool but does work quite well in
> focused knowledge domains such as a language).
>
> If I can help at all with this, happy to...
>
> Scott
> J. Scott Johnson
>
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>
> Phone:
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> Yahoo IM: fuzzygroup
>
>
