Discussion: FreeBSD.org search engine

[Daniel Gerzo]

Hello dear subscribers,

  it has been already few times discussed that our current search
  implementation, even despite of some work done to get the issues
  fixed, does not work quite ideal and that we should switch
  to some other search engine out there.  It has been proposed to use
  either google.com or yahoo.com searchers, but neither of these two
  were picked up, either because of political, technical or some other
  reasons that I'm not going to describe in this email.

  What I want to bring to the discussion is a pretty nice service that
  is currently hosted at (IIRC) the second biggest russian search
  company, Rambler.  It is currently available through
  http://freebsd.rambler.ru/ and provides fairly sophisticated FreeBSD
  mailing list search.  I have already contacted glebius@ who works at
  Rambler (and he is not the only FreeBSD committer working there)
  and it seems like Rambler would like to support FreeBSD with their
  search engine.  One of the problems that has been revealed is that
  Rambler is currently missing English help.  On the other hand,
  glebius@ has already called Russian committers for help and there
  are at least 3-4 of them willing to help with translation to
  English.  The other thing might be that the Rambler search engine
  binary must not be leaked; that means if Rambler provided the binary
  to us in any possible way, it will certainly not be available for
  everyone of us.

  Currently, we are not aware of way to make Rambler to search in more
  specific mailing lists, say freebsd-doc and freebsd-www; only in one
  at the moment.  It is essential to be able to limit search queries
  to more maling lists and glebius@ is quiet sure that will not be a
  problem at all.  He also noted, that the Rambler developer will add
  any additional functionality that would be needed.

  I have also asked, if it is possible to search FreeBSD.org web site
  with Rambler.  I have been told, that currently that is not the
  case, but the code is prepared.  It just needs to be enabled to
  index the pages.

  Now, what I would like to hear from you guys is, what do you
  think about Rambler -- do you like the idea?  What do you see as a
  requirement for us to be able to switch to Rambler?  Reasons that
  would prevent us to take a step forward and improve our web and
  mailing list search?

-- 
Best regards,
 Daniel                          mailto:danger at FreeBSD.org