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Search "Happens"

by earnest on Fri, 05/09/2008 - 06:26

This weekend WorkHabit shall be participating in the Minnesota search sprint. I am very excited to put my skills to work on such an important project. I know that most people know "search" is pretty important, but to me, it can be the bread-and-butter of a site/application. When one thinks of search, usually some little white box comes to mind in which you type some arbitrary input into, and you get a list of outputs; however, search is so much more.

• "search" happens when you go do a drupal site, and something gets inputed into a custom filter, and a regex match is made, and metadata is queried from Drupal
• "search" happens when you visit a magazine site and you don't know a word; so you copy+paste to google to further your knowledge
• "search" happens when you login to facebook, and it corss-references your extended network of friends for other people you may know.
• "search" happens when you scan a document, and you use an OCR reader to find certain text that's actually an image you imported in (abstract search)

The jist here is that search is not just a one-to-one relationship of text input, and a list of text-results output; there are so many ways to search and dig for information. A few module have come out that start to put this idea to light ( faceted search ). There are also tools to allow us to search in a more abstract manner, and index/dig through more mediums (Solr/search_attachments).
So this is one reason I am happy to be a participant; none of the above mentioned items will happen overnight in Drupal, however as with all things, a solid building block and core is needed for any of this to be possible. that said, I hope to further the core search along so that "search" can really happen :).

 Stay tuned for live updates from the search spring!!

Tags: Drupalsearch

earnest's blog