Results tagged “search”

I have been following Tokyo Cabinet for a while, and I was especially keen to try full-text indexes which where added recently. I'm actually so obsessed with it that I had Google alert set on words "Tokyo Cabinet" and apart from occasional political event in Tokyo's political cabinet, it was useful in finding interesting information when I got link to this blog post how to create simple intranet search by Mikio Hirabayashi which include easy to follow instructions to make local intranet search, complete with web crawler (in ruby).

Unfortunatly, Google translate isn't really kind to it and creates something which is not really usable. But, I managed to condense it to following script:

#!/bin/sh -x

url=https://blog.rot13.org/

test -f intra.tsv || ruby wgettsv -allow "$url.*html" -deny cgi -max 10000 $url > intra.tsv
tctmgr inform tctsearch.tct
tctmgr importtsv tctsearch.tct intra.tsv
tctmgr setindex -it qgram tctsearch.tct title
tctmgr setindex -it qgram tctsearch.tct body
...which is really awesome if you ask me. All the good things of Tokyo Cabinet with a little bit on qgram index on the top.

I will try to summarize blog post here to provide English speaking web public an opportunity to find out more if they can read Japanise Concept is really simple:

...and very nicely split into components. If you still didn't give Tokio Cabinet a try! If you want, you can take a look at my Tokyo Cabinet scripts as a starting point. I really need to make proper Debian packages for recent versions, so watch this space...

I'm somewhat proud to announce that current version of pgestraier now includes consistency triggers which will keep Hyper Estraier index up-to-date with data in your database.

That, coupled with ability to create full-text indexes easily, just by running helper script on database, makes pgestraier powerful solution if you need fast full-text indexing with ability to off-load search to another machine (thanks to Hyper Estraier P2P architecture) or need perfect N-gram search results.

This project might also help people who are porting applications which use MySQL full-text search to PostgreSQL (actually, it's it going to be used just for that).

Real trunk of development is in Subversion, and CVS repository at pgFoundry is just a mirror copy. Enjoy it, while I prepare to leave for seaside.

Search::Estraier will be perl API to Hyper Estraier. It's written using excellent Inline::C

Grand plan is to use pgestraier from PostgreSQL to query Estraier index and Search::Estraier to create index. This would allow to combine structured data in RDBMS with semi-structured data in full text index. Additional normalized tables can be created using materialized views in PostgreSQL, and if all goes well, it will be part of WebPAC version 2 which will be universal hybrid (structured/full text) storage.

Update: I had good luck to find already working perl bindings for Hyper Estraier at MATSUNO Tokuhiro blog. Thanks a lot! So, work on Search::Estraier is suspended.

How do you search your data?

I often got questions like: how should I make my search?. Answer to that questions is: It depends. This is a quick overview of few really good solutions to searching your data:


  • swish-e

    Toolkit for building search engines. Supports meta data, properties
    (data which isn't indexed but just stored alongside index, gzip in this
    case), regular expressions and different input formats (both from [perl]
    scripts and from filesystem). It supports searching (but not indexing) from
    perl using SWISH::API.

    It doesn't support incremental indexing in
    current stable versions, but code does exists in CVS, but it isn't stable
    yet (for example index merge always segfaults for me using incremental
    indexing). Indexing from perl will hopefully be available when I

    finish perl module
    for it.

    If you want custom search engine, this is my first choice.
  • Xapian and Omega

    Another great search engine with very good perl support (for both
    indexing and searching).

    Only drawback is that it doesn't support wild-cards (for valid reason,
    your stammer should do that work!), but if you need to update your indexes
    often, I would recommend it. It's a order of magnitude about three
    times slower in indexing and somewhat slower when searching than swish-e,
    but speed isn't everything!

    If I need custom engine for dynamically changing data, this is my choice.
    It comes with Omega search tools which can index files on disk and provide
    binary (C++) cgi for searching. I prefer to build my own.
  • Estraier

    Very good search engine with clustering of results. Support wild-cards, but doesn't support any meta data (you can't search just titles).

    This is a valid alternative to href="http://desktop.google.com/">Google Desktop for Linux
    users.
  • SWISH++
    Rewrite of swish-e in C++. Uses very clever heuristics to extracts just words from English language reducing index size and producing blazingly fast searches.

    However it's not well suited in indexing foreign languages or non-English
    words (e.g. dates or numbers). Doesn't have any support for perl out-of-the
    box, but at one point in time

    I wrote module for indexing and searching
    . However, without clever
    heuristics it's not faster than swish-e so I discontinued development of
    that module (but it is fully functional as-is).

So, answer isn't easy. But I hope that this quick overview will help someone.


Updated on 2005-01-06: Olly Betts contacted me about this post and provoked me to do benchmark of Xapian again. I was totally unfair, because new benchmark
doesn't confirm my claim that it's order of magnitude slower. I will
probably write separate post about this benchmark because it also compares
incremental and non-incremental version of swish-e.