Another feature for Ht://Dig

[Aaron Turner <aturner@linuxkb.org>]

Marc,  (Hugo read this too)

I know you're looking into the port of htdig to SQL, but I was wondering
if you'd be interested in some other things first.

First, you're probably aware that 3.1.4 was released.  I haven't tested if
your patches are compatible or not.  If you could check that, it would be
great.

Secondly, Hugo and I have been talking about implimenting more "natural
english searching" capabilities to the LinuxKB.  Things like:

How do I compile a Linux kernel?
How can I setup a PPP connection to my ISP?

Are more friendly to end users than boolean logic search strings.

The new Ht://Dig 3.2.x series supports phrase searching so people can
search for "compile linux kernel" or "setup PPP connection" which is a
positive step in that direction.  I have no idea how hard it would be able
to port your 3.1.3 patches to this, but it would be nice to start playing
with it.

Also it would be nice to be able to search on words, based on their
distance to other words in the search string.  Something like:

(compile kernel)4

would find all docuements with the two words "compile" and "kernel" that
are no more than 4 words apart.  So:

"How do I compile the linux kernel?" would be a match
"How do I compile htdig on a system with 2.1.x kernel?" would not be

Having both the distance and phrase features (with your existing de-dup
code) would be very powerful I think.  I'm not sure what a good user
interface to the distance feature would be (I just provided one idea), so
I'm hoping the rest of the list (specifically Hugo) would provide some
thoughts on the matter.

In talking with the Ht://Dig developers, all the information you need to
determine the distance between two words in a document is already there
in the DB's.

I'd write more but I've got a splitting headache...

--
Aaron Turner, Core Developer       http://vodka.linuxkb.org/~aturner/
Linux Knowledge Base Organization  http://linuxkb.org/
Because world domination requires quality open documentation.
aka: aturner@vicinity.com, aturner@pobox.com, ion_beam_head@ashtech.net