Re: Search engines (was: HTML-Info design)

[Lennart Borgman]

On Sun, Dec 28, 2014 at 7:00 PM, Lars Ingebrigtsen <address@hidden> wrote:
> An interesting problem is Emacs and searching.  The various Gnus mail
> backends have various searching interfaces, but it would be nice to have
> a more general Emacs searching mechanism, where you can search parts of
> directory trees, etc.
>
> Has anybody looked into hooking into the various OS-level search
> interfaces?  Spotlight in OS X, the Explorer thingie in Windows and
> <something> in the various GNU/Linux distributions?
>
> A basic search engine is easy to implement (I've done it a couple of
> times), but the main work is in understanding the various file formats
> and keeping the reverse index updated when files change.  If there were
> OS-level search stuff we could just hook into, that would obviously be
> better.
>
> And provide searching in the Emacs manuals.


I did that some years ago and posted about it here.

I was mostly looking for a faster grep in the files that I did not
change, i e Emacs internals (C/Elisp). It worked pretty well then. The
interface is very similar to grep.

The search enginges I tried was MS Windows built in and Lucene (not
sure there, but I think it was Lucene).

I put the code in nXhtml, but have not touched it since then.

Looking at http://opensearchserver.com/ I think it would be much
easier to implement it now. The API there looks pretty good.