Re: Adding a "plugin" parser to ifile

On Thu, 6 Mar 2003, Karl Vogel wrote:

> >> On Thu, 06 Mar 2003 08:36:52 -0800 (PST),
> >> Booker Bense <[email protected]> said:
>
> B> 95% of the time I'm finding ifile incredibly useful, the other 5% is
> B> driving me crazy. Looking through 30 email folders for my wife's most
> B> recent email is not improving my email experience. While I can fix this
> B> in front of ifile, I think it would be generally useful to do it within
> B> the structure of ifile. For example, if email is from my wife, just
> B> return my wife's address, and ignore the rest of the content.
>
>    Wouldn't something like an inverted index that understands the format of
>    mail folders be better for searching?

- I'm not using ifile for searching. The problem is that for a
certain class of messages I'm having difficulties getting ifile
to work reliably. It's not putting things where I expect them to
be. Partly this is a problem with the email filter I have around
ifile not logging enough info, but mostly it's ifile not giving
the "right" answer.

> Isn't ifile better suited to
>    deciding where to store something?

- Exactly, I want it to make the right decision.

>
>    A search script doesn't have to be fiendishly complex;
>    http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2003/02/19/engine.html
>    is a nifty article about writing a vector-space search engine in Perl
>    with the following useful features:
>
>     * Searches take place in RAM, there is no disk or database access
>     * Queries can be arbitrarily long
>     * Users don't have to bother with Boolean logic or regular expressions
>     * It's easy to do 'find similar' searches on returned documents
>     * You can set up a 'saved results' basket, and do similarity
>       searches on the documents in it
>

- Sounds like they reinvented WAIS. WAIS searching and ifile
sorting have a lot in common. Thanks for the pointer though.

- Booker C. Bense