[OWW-Discuss] Search improvements are coming

[Bill F]

I just finished off a min-overhaul of the OpenWetWare full text search. The
changes are still not deployed in the
main OWW server but I will do it this weekend.

I managed to find a way to rewrite the search to allow a tird option on the
full text search box on the left hand margin of MediaWiki, also known as the
sidebar.

The button needs a better label but what it does is pretty clear. when you
use the large new button on the bottom, the search is done only on pages
beginning with the current page.

As an example, if you're working on your Lab Notebook, your search will be
constrained only to the current level of the Notebook you are working on.

Here's an example:

Assume I'm in my Lab Notebook:

Notebook:Bill Flanagan

If I search from that page, anything in the underlying pages will be
returned. No other documents will be searched for other Notebooks or for the
main OpenWetWare server.

I'm going to place intermediate pages in the Lab Notebook for months and
years; you'll be able to look at a calendar for the month or the year and
also search from there to constrain your search to entries for that period
of time.

Like the Google MediaWiki search tag I created ("<google />" or
"<google>Page</google>", there's also a new "drop-in" search button to allow
you to add a search on any page that will return results constrained to the
target page.

For instance, I can go to my user page, "User:Bill Flanagan" and place a
search on that page for my Lab Notebook. It would look like this:

<sitesearch>Notebook:Bill Flanagan</sitesearch>

Searching with this entry field will show a list of pages in my lab
notebook. When I want to return, a new item is on the search result page to
return me to the "User:Bill Flanagan" page where I started from.

The next level of integration will be a bit more interesting. OK. I'm
easilly amused. So what. LOL. I am going to build a search aggregation class
that will allow you to create a list of base pags that I want to roll into a
single search.

This will mean that if you run a lab, all of the researchers will be able to
look at searches of their colleagues notebooks. There are a few other
"micro-community" building exercises I'm starting in on to add more cohesion
to collaborators working within OpenWetWare.

There are a few other search activities I think we should consider.

1. Boolean searched.

There's no way to say "show me all of the MIT pages but none with pictures
on them". Maybe nobody ever wants to say something like this. But it's a
pretty useful idea: constrain search and move the MW search to be something
that is a tad more useful than using the Yellow Pages. And I mean the book!

The "search from here" feature  is a trivial example of such a search.

2. Wild-card searches

There are no ways to say "show me all of the entries from any lab. If I know
that labs always have the word, "lab" in their name, I should be able to use
this info. MediaWiki makes is so hard to do something like that. But my
recent foray into the bowels of OWW has brought me to understand how this
can be done. I hope we can do this before I go crazy waiting for my current
search to return any useful information.

If anyone knows of other "common sense" features that could be added to
search that you covet but have not ever been able to access before, please
let me know .


I'll send out a more detailed description of the recent changes to search
next week. But I will have the new stuff on OpenWetWare this weekend.

Thanks.

Bill


The Google search gadget I wrote earlier in the week gave me the sense of
how to make it work with the regular mediawiki search engine.
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