Building a Vector Space Search Engine

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Hello, world! This is Simon Cozens, www.perl.com managing editor, 
bringing you the latest goings-on from the world of Perl and our 
own site.

* Perl at large.

CPAN was hit by a glitch this week as Funet's disks were reporting 
some read errors; looks like the problems have now been resolved, 
and things should be flooding in from PAUSE:

    http://use.perl.org/article.pl?sid=03/02/16/1416231&mode=thread&tid=32

Newsfactor Network is running some articles on Perl 6, entitled 
"Perl Features of the Future": all of the Perl 6 design team 
members were interviewed--you'll find some great quotes and 
thoughts in them.  

    http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/20736.html
    http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/20748.html

And finally, registration for YAPC::NA is now open! If you can 
get yourself to Boca Raton, Florida between the 16th and 18th of 
June, go register!

    http://yapc.org/America/register.shtml

* What's new on www.perl.com?

Our weekly Perl 6 summary report is here, thanks to the 
hard-working Piers. This week: optimizing the main loops, notes 
from the Perl 6 design meeting, and what's the difference between 
an array and a list? (I don't know, what is the difference 
between an array and a list?)

    http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2003/02/p6pdigest/20030216.html

And for our feature article, a subject that's quite close to my 
heart: Suppose you've got a bunch of documents you want to search 
through. You could index all the words in them, or stick it all 
in a database and use a DBI-based full-text search system; or you 
could use a ready-rolled indexing system like WAIS. But there's 
another way. Maciej Ceglowski, a researcher and developer of 
search engines, introduces the vector-space search engine, a 
powerful technique that can be simply implemented in Perl and 
run from memory. His article is interesting in its own right as 
an introduction to the world of search engine design:

    http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2003/02/19/engine.html

Until next week,
Happy hacking!

Simon Cozens
<[email protected]>

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*** Featured Articles ***

Building a Vector Space Search Engine in Perl
Have you ever wondered how search engines work, or how to add one 
to your program? Maciej Ceglowski walks you through building a 
simple, fast and effective vector-space search engine.

http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2003/02/19/engine.html

***

This week on Perl 6, week ending 2003-02-16
Optimizations to the main loops, reflections from the Perl 6 
design meeting, arrays versus lists, and much more...

http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2003/02/p6pdigest/20030216.html

***

Module::Build
Traditionally, modules have been put together with 
ExtUtils::MakeMaker. Dave Rolsky describes a more modern 
solution, and in the first of a two-part series, tells us 
more about it.

http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2003/02/12/module1.html

***

This week on Perl 6, week ending 2003-02-09
Beating Python, Parrot objects, shortcutting assignment operators, 
and much more...

http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2003/02/p6pdigest/20030209.html

***

This week on Perl 6, week ending 2003-02-02
Packfiles, coroutines, secure sandboxes, Damian takes a break, 
and much more...

http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2003/02/p6pdigest/20030202.html

***

Improving mod_perl Sites' Performance: Part 7
In this month's episode of Stas Bekman's mod_perl series, more on 
how settings in your Apache configuration can make or break 
performance. 

http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2003/02/05/mod_perl.html

***

Embedding Perl in HTML with Mason
HTML::Mason is my favourite toolkit for building pages out of 
Perl-based components: can Dave Rolsky and Ken Williams do it 
justice in their new book? I take a look at "Embedding Perl in 
HTML with Mason" and find it a mixed bag...

http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2003/01/30/review.html

***

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