Mailing-List: contact lucy-dev-help@incubator.apache.org; run by ezmlm
Precedence: bulk
Reply-To: lucy-dev@incubator.apache.org
Received-SPF: pass (athena.apache.org: domain of moritz@faui2k3.org designates
 213.95.10.24 as permitted sender)
Message-ID: <4E515DE2.5010601@faui2k3.org>
Date: Sun, 21 Aug 2011 21:34:58 +0200
From: Moritz Lenz <moritz@faui2k3.org>
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US;
 rv:1.9.1.16) Gecko/20110702 Icedove/3.0.11
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: "lucy-dev@incubator.apache.org" <lucy-dev@incubator.apache.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Subject: [lucy-dev] Automagic phrase search

Hi,

in the past I've often wondered why "home made" search engines on
websites (often even on really big sites) feel much inferior compared to
the big names in search business like Google, Yahoo, Bing and DuckDuckGo.

One of my conclusions is that Google & co. usually treat the order of
search terms as an important indicator for relevance, while most other
search engines don't.

For example if you enter the words 'search engine' (without the quotes),
you'll mostly get exact matches matches first, as if you had really
searched for '"search engine"'.
Google goes even further: if you search for a number of words in a row,
it ranks documents higher that have most but not necessarily all of the
search words in the right order next to each other, even if there are
one or two other words in between.

Long rambling, short message: I'd love to have a mechanism in lucy to
provide an automagic phrase search as above, which honors the order of
search words even outside an explicit phrase search, and less
restrictively than an explicit phrase search.

Is something like that already implemented, and if no, is it on any agenda?
I know far too little about Lucy's internal workings to know if that's
easy or even possible, but for me it would be a real killer feature.
If somebody points me the direction where to start I might even give it
a try, though my C fu is mediocre at best.

Cheers,
Moritz