Tillmann Rendel wrote:
Andrew Coppin wrote:
In general, I find *most* search functions to be fairly unhelpful. Google is the shining exception to this rule; it almost always seems to figure out what you're after.
I guess doing text searching is just a fundamentally difficult problem, and the guys at Google have spent a hell of a long time on it.
text searching is a well-known problem. ranking search results by relevance is the key to google's success. read the paper about google to learn more:
Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" in: Proceedings of the 7th International WWW Conference, 1998, Brisbane
http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf
Thank you for that link. An interesting paper. I hadn't seen it before. I've added a link to a Google site search to the haskell.org front page. I can't find a way to link the existing search box at the top directly to it and can't create a 'form' element, so I've created a link labelled 'Search haskell.org' to this intermediate page on my site http://www.millstream.com/haskellorgsearch.html If someone can point the haskell.org search box directly at the Google site search please do so. It currently searches *.haskell.org/* which may be too broad? I can adjust as required. Richard.