restricting search results (why?) (was Re: Search for email)

Zoe ([email protected]) wrote:
> Hi Jerry,
> 
> On Apr 23, 2004, at 15:35, Jerry Zurek wrote:
> 
> >The first 47 emails are displayed.
> 
> This is a feature :)
> 
> The application only returns the top x results for a given search to 
> prevent drowning you in millions of hits.

But you don't drown because you only see a certain number per page,
just like google does it.

> >How do I get to see the other 380+ ?
> 
> You don't. What good would 436 hits do you? :)

I think it's best if the user can decide that, rather than the app
enforcing it.

> Your best bet is to narrow your search and/or use contextual search.
> 
> If nonetheless you really, really want to see all those hits, you can 
> increase the value of Envelope.fetch.limit in the configuration 
> assistant.

This is a lot better than nothing, however it requires restarting Zoe.
Why not just do what google does?

There's another problem with limiting to a small number of results by
default, and I hope I explain this right - the selection of which
results get returned doesn't seem to be sensitive to how you're
displaying results.  I'm saying this because I did a search on
something which appears regularly through my mail archive (something
that a cron job has produced regularly for the last year) and sorted
by date, newest first.  With Envelope.fetch.limit at the default
setting, the newest match listed at the top was several months old.
By increasing this limit, the newest match was within the last week,
as it should be.  So if you really insist on having the default limit
very low (and I don't see why, as I said above) then it should at
least make sure not to exclude very relevant results.

Thanks,

Adam


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