Attractive Open Source Search Interfaces? 65
An anonymous reader writes "I work for a company that manages an online database for the political market. We add to this DB daily with updates from a variety of sources and our customers then search through this content via our Solr/Lucene search engine. My problem is, our search interface is a little, well, basic and I would love to know if there are any feature-rich open source alternatives out there. The only one I can find is Flamenco, and while that seems strong on categorisation, that seems to be about the height of it."
Sphinx Search (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:1, Funny)
In fact, Sphinx is used on Slashdot ...
Re:Sphinx Search (Score:5, Insightful)
That's really not the glowing recommendation you thought it would be...
Re:Sphinx Search (Score:5, Insightful)
Right. Slashdot search is HORRIBLE. I've better luck finding old articles with Google
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Here's another vote in favor of Sphinx. I recently was presented with an online shopping site whose search functions were pathetically slow and inaccurate. I replaced these with Sphinx and now get incredibly fast results which are nearly always on target. You'll want to play with the weights assigned to fields and other features to optimize the searches, but if your content is already stored in a MySQL or PostgreSQL database, Sphinx should be one of your top contenders.
As the parent says, the indexing is
greenstone.org (Score:1, Informative)
... for offline viewing and searching.
KISS (Score:3, Insightful)
<input type="text" name="q" title="Enter your search terms"
<input type="submit" value="Search" title="Submit your search request"
</form>
Anything more complex will probably aggravate your users.
Re: (Score:2)
Thank you! See, I've been using the 1040 for my users' search needs, and boy, for the life of me, I've just never understood why they've been so pissed about it.
Re: (Score:2)
You can easily add special 'keyword: value' pairs that the query parser can recognize which can provide all of the features you needed.
Examples:
opening file crashes project: word
long load times type: defect
sales report doctype: xls
How to use these keywords should be specified in a help or advanced page.
As you said, the simple interface will solve
Re:KISS (Score:4, Insightful)
My point is that it works for google and google allows advanced queries very nicely
Google also has hundreds of the world's best computer scientists working on natural language parsing techniques, and they still need a load of documentation [google.com] saying "if you want to use this function, please type your query according to this specific format" (which is no better than having separate input boxes IMO; in fact for the advanced search [google.com] that's exactly what they do)
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That's only half of the battle. What about results?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
KISS is retarded. Because simplicity does not always equal efficiency. Efficiency equals efficiency. Plain KISS makes you end up with stuff that is too “simple” to be useful, like Clippy, MS Bob, or Notepad. The other extreme is just as stupid, and gives you things like VI and Emacs, with a wall as a learning “curve”.
The optimum is obvious: Balanced in the middle, relative to the user’s needs. More power when he needs it, less complexity when he doesn’t.
I, for one, don
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KISS is retarded. Because simplicity does not always equal efficiency. Efficiency equals efficiency. Plain KISS makes you end up with stuff that is too “simple” to be useful, like Clippy, MS Bob, or Notepad. The other extreme is just as stupid, and gives you things like VI and Emacs, with a wall as a learning “curve”.
The optimum is obvious: Balanced in the middle, relative to the user’s needs. More power when he needs it, less complexity when he doesn’t.
I, for one, don’t call anything that does not at least have boolean operations, property fields (like “site:slashdot.org”) and regular expressions a search that fits my needs and level of power.
Are people who want less somehow better? Or why are they preferred?
Rhetorical question. I know why they are preferred: Because they are louder, and think they are entitled to get it pre-chewed.
Also, what is the point of allowing only one way? Nobody is better.
Add a multiple-choice element, that lets you choose plain text, boolean-enhanced (like google) and full regexps. Makes everyone happy, hurts nobody.
Maybe next time you don’t apply KISS to your method of searching for a solution. :)
There is nothing simple about Clippy or MS Bob; those have nothing to do with KISS methodologies. Notepad, on the other hand, is simple, and is very, very useful.
You are advocating a search box that supports booleans, properties, and regex, with radio buttons to swap between types. Imagine for a moment you are a user hitting that page. What are these buttons for, you might ask. What happens if I select boolean-enhanced and put in a query without boolean operators? What will it default to? Who writes t
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Linux is just another Unix, but thankfully, a bit more modern and progressive than many of the others. It's as complex as it needs to be, and no more....that's not taking into account the various windowing environments of various qualities (although Windows 7's interface reminds me more of Gnome than it does Windows XP, somehow).
Then again, may
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Contrary to popular belief, Ask Slashdot, even when asking questions about Open Source free alternatives, is not an open invitation to bash Microsoft.
Please rephrase your comment in the form of something helpful.
We express our sincerest apologies for the confusion.
Anonymously,
Mr. Coward
Re:Windows Live Search is free!!!! (Score:4, Funny)
>I just wish there was a button labeled "Complain to Windows development about this feature and why it sucks".
There is, it's the "Buy" button next to a Mac on the Apple website.
Wish I had the money to burn for one of those babies
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How about Sphider? (Score:3, Interesting)
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I use Sphider, but dang, the re-indexing function times out every time I try. I have to delete the index and run it as if it were new.
Yahoo IBM OmniFind Product (Score:3, Informative)
Free solution from Yahoo/IBM -- http://omnifind.ibm.yahoo.net/
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Swish-E (Score:3, Informative)
I've used Swish in it's variants since it was an alternative to WAIS.
http://www.swish-e.org/ [swish-e.org]
Um.. (Score:2, Funny)
Just curious, what's 'political market' ? Is it really that bad already?
What sort of database? (Score:3, Insightful)
Are you talking about searching web pages or a database and presenting the results as web pages? If the latter, then wht's the database?
How about... (Score:2)
...a flatfile with regexps? ;)
One line per entry, index at the beginning.
P.S.: No, I‘m not totally serious... or am I? ;)
Carrot2 - Search Results Clustering Engine (Score:2)
GUI showcase (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
busybox ash script (Score:1)
You can write an extremely fast and powerful (b)ash cgi-script using a properly compiled snapshot of busybox (it will call builtin find, sed, grep... which is much faster than calling separate programs) If you run it on a static webpage using busbox httpd as the server it can even be a function within your server script.
#!/PATH_TO/sh
search()
{
#your code here
}
advanced_search()
{
#your code here
}
restart_server()
{
#your code here
}
Hyper Estraier (Score:2)
Hyper Estraier [osreviews.net] has a Google-like interface that has some additional features such as including regular expressions in your queries.
YUI is nice for building user interfaces. (Score:2)
YUI [yahoo.com] has a BSD style license and is really nice for building cross browser friendly user interfaces.
The downside of YUI is that the CSS does not validate as it uses the "holly hack" to do IE specific stuff instead of an if define in the header and a separate IE stylesheet.
I know people that like blueprint, you might also check out http://www.webdesignbooth.com/10-promising-css-framework-that-worth-a-look/ and see if any of these meet your needs.
Data Search Interface (Score:1)
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VisiNav looks very interesting, with a strong focus on class/object hierarchies that could work well on clean, well-structured data sets -- and may be exactly what the poster needs!
Could you explain here how to continue with VisiNav past the demo? How would the poster adapt VisiNav to his needs: set up his own system and use his own dataset?
Is VisiNav a research experiment, an open source project, or a commercial product? What licences is it available with? Is it open source?
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The underlying data has to be in graph-structured format (in RDF syntax); reasoning, most notably object consolidation, is supported via OWL. Once the data is indexed, users can search and browse right away. There's no configuration needed, because the ordering of data is done based on the calculated ranks. The UI can be configured via XSLT and
Use DBSight Free version (Score:1)
Twigkit: Not quite open source ... (Score:1)
Open Source Solr-powered Search UI (Score:1)
Ontopia (Score:1)
good search UX is a process (Score:1)
I agree, Flamenco's faceted metadata is a great way to look at structured data. But Solr has facets, and they're really easy to enable. So that kind of functionality is not really the hard part.
The really tricky part is finding out what your users need (which is of course not what they say they need).
Use your search logs: the most important part is seeing what they search for and especially if they have zero results. Talk to them about why: they may have different vocabulary or need something new, or it