[pmwiki-users] pagelist / searchresults with weighted search

[a.sonderhoff at gassi-tv.de]

With several PmWiki powered pages I am experiencing limitations in the Search functionality to a point where searching is nearly useless. This happens when there are a lot of pages (100+) with a large amount of content (50+ words). What happens is, that when using certain search terms, the page which is most relevant is nearly never listed as the first hit. This is because the search results can only be ordered by ctime, title, group etc., but not relevance/search quality.

I was looking into writing a cookbook recipe myself to implement a simple weighted search (e. g. Title 0-20 pts, Description 0-10 pts, other content 0-5 pts) which the results can be sorted by (I used to do weighted searches a lot with mysql). But that would have meant to write an indexing routine of sorts. Of course PmWiki already comes with a simple search index, which basically lists keywords for the pages in the wiki. But the .pageindex seems to have no information about the quantity of these keywords within a specific page.

Any ideas how to implement a weighted search without having to do that from scratch, e. g. adding this to the pagelist? I have to admit, that my understanding of PmWiki's internal functions and programming style is rather limited at this point. I am not so much a developer, more of a designer actually.

Thanks for any input. I think weighted search is the only major feature PmWiki is missing to be a fully grown up wiki/cms.

—Josh

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