[pmwiki-users] pagelist / searchresults with weighted search

a.sonderhoff at gassi-tv.de a.sonderhoff at gassi-tv.de
Fri Jul 29 06:46:05 CDT 2011


Thanks for the suggestion, but I am more of a designer and less of a real developer. I tend to get lost in complex existing code like the PmWiki internal functions. I managed to fork Gilles' suggested cookbook recipe (SortByScore) and change it to suit my purpose for now. It's still some kind of a quick and dirty solution as SortByScore uses fmt=score with a fixed SDV instead of order=score with the option to use your own fmt templates from Site/LocalTemplates.

SortByScore Pros:
• does the job somehow
• configureable weight multiplier for title
• leightweight cookbook recipe solution
• extends already existing (:pagelist:) functionality

SortByScore Cons:
• lacking visual customization (uses fixed fmt=score instead of order=score)
• no normalization of score (for consistent gui visualization of search result quality, e. g. always 5 stars for top result/s)

-Josh

On Jul/29, 2011, at 1312 , V.Krishn wrote:

> On Friday 29 Jul 2011 5:48:44 am a.sonderhoff at gassi-tv.de wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> Have a look at some of search engines here:
> http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PITS/00333
> 
> From a brief look at php impementation of Lucene in Zend framework I guess 
> that would be an easy approach.
> 
>> 
>> 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
> 
> -- 
> Regards.
> V.Krishn




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