[Nms-cgi-devel] Advanced Search

[sadf a. <amh...@ho...>]

Hey, this is Joe, (on a spam account, I went home for the holidays and osu 
doesn't let me use their outgoing server, as I found out after trying to 
send this message 8-9 times).  I wanted to discuss an idea I
had - an Advanced Search.

In the nms home page ( http://nms-cgi.sourceforge.net ), Dave states 
underfuture plans (condensed):

>Future Plans
>The initial plan is to create a set of scripts that mirror exactly the
>functionality of Matt's scripts (minus the insecurities and bugs). Once 
>this
>is complete, I'd like to look at extending the archive in four directions:

>- Adding new scripts that are not in the original list.
>- Adding enhance versions of the scripts which require slightly more
>-knowledge from the person installing them - perhaps needing modules from 
>CPAN.

My idea is to create an "Advanced Search" (a script not origininally
available in MWS), which could overcome many of the shortcomings of the
simple search.  The Advanced Search would have the following additional
features in addition to the functionality of the simple search:

- Additional types of logical operations, and the ability to combine types 
(such as functionality found in google's search)
- Ability to sort results (relevance, matches per page, title, filename,
last modified, etc)
- Sort in ascending or descending order
- Display additional information about each result (last modified date,
context of search, matches per page, etc)
- Ability to be used "simply" (meaning that 99% of fields should be
optional, so that the search could also be embedded in the page)
- Ability to use a query from simple search.
- Options in the config to block certain directories and files
- Ability to only display a range of matches per page, with links to
remaining matches, etc.
- More?

I have a preliminary written up here:
http://www.amherst.k12.oh.us/cgi-bin/search/source_code.pl Note that the
relevance sort requires an additional script I wrote to condense the weblog 
into a format that is faster to search through (its cronned for once every 
24 hours).  The relevance sort is FAR superior to the other sorts for most 
usage; however, it does require the weblog to be in a certain format so that 
the exterior script can parse it, which might confuse some of our less 
advanced users.  Perhaps we could split the script into  "Advanced Search" 
and "Really Advanced Search"? :)

Anyone have any suggestions/ideas/flames?

Joe Ryan - jfryan




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