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

Hi Adam,

On May 04, 2004, at 12:48, Adam Spiers wrote:

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

Yes. But its expensive to compute.

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

Sure. This is why there is a configuration to control this behavior.

> This is a lot better than nothing, however it requires restarting Zoe.

Yes. And?

> Why not just do what google does?

Because your lonely PC is still not a full fledge data center.

> 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.

The "relevance" of results is computed as follow:

http://lucene.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/faq/faqmanager.cgi? 
file=chapter.search&toc=faq#q31

On top of this, the application aggregates the different result sets it  
gets and returns the top X. Nothing much to it.

As you can see, time is not part of the equation by default.

Practically speaking, what do you propose?

Cheers,

R.



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