an eddy in the bitstream

Month: February 2006 (Page 1 of 2)

The State of Search

Always searching for the latest in search engine development.

Some interesting work lately on CPAN.

I had not seen KinoSearch before; a very interesting “loose port” of Lucene written in C and Perl. I need to try it out.

Search::QueryParser also looks promising. I was just thinking that such a thing would be helpful for SWISH::HiLiter and/or HTML::HiLiter … or maybe even Swish-e itself.

Search::ContextGraph is older, one of Maciej Ceglowski’s projects from back before he became a fulltime painter and world traveller.

Search::Estraier is Dobrica Pavlinusic’s pure Perl implementation of the Hyper Estraier Perl API. I know Dobrica’s a big fan of Hyper Estraier, even over Swish-e and Xapian.

Search::FreeText appears to be abandoned, or at least not actively maintained. Last updated in 2003. Too bad; the documentation makes it look interesting anyway. Although it does use DB_File, which I know from experience with Perlfect, does not scale well above 20K+ documents.

Search::Xapian has recently been updated. There’s lots of activity on the Xapian project. It’s at or near the top of candidates for the Swish3 backends.

Search::InvertedIndex is one I had not seen before, but it looks very interesting. I have been thinking about a SwishQL – a SQL backend for Swish3, and Search::InvertedIndex offers a mysql backend. Benjamin Franz wrote it; he also wrote CGI::Minimal, which I used for a while with CrayDoc (contributed a patch too, iirc). I’ll have to come back to this one.

Search::Indexer. Another one I’d not heard of, but which bears investigation. Author Laurent Dami is a familiar name to me, as he also wrote Search::QueryParser (above) and a handy FormBuilder TT patch I’ve been using.

Switching IMAP server from UW to Dovecot

Having some trouble with poor performance with UW IMAP server finally pushed me over the edge today, so I migrated to Dovecot. A good move. Took me a while to figure out that I needed to turn OFF the namespace setting in my mail client (Mozilla, Thunderbird) in “Server Settings -> Advanced”. I also had to make the default mail dir ~/.maildir/.

This great Perl script eased the conversion of old mbox format to new maildir format.

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