[Zope-dev] How to choose: Or, Not and And when using searchResults().

[Chris McDonough]

Marco Nova wrote:
> > DC has no no concrete plans to implement operators or precedence in
> > catalog queries, although I think it's a really
> > super-worthwhile idea.
> > We're currently focusing on the things in the Zope 2.4 plan (see
> > http://dev.zope.org/Resources/zope_240_plan.html).  If
> > someone wanted to
> > try to implement it, they could create a fishbowl project and I can
> > provide assistance.
> 
> Why don't integrate already working search engine such as pls (www.pls.com)
> ?
> It shouldn't be so much difficult to integrate.

It would not be possible to do field and keyword index queries against
methods of Zope objects with a third-party indexer.  It would
additionally not be possible to full-text-index anything but the results
of a rendered HTML page.

If ZCatalog did nothing but create full text indexes of rendered HTML, I
think we'd be all for going with a third-party search engine instead of
continuing to maintain it. But ZCatalog is not just about searching
text.  ZCatalog currently lets you relate objects in a Zope instance to
each other in ways that aren't possible without it.  For example, you
can catalog a bunch of different kinds of objects, and perform a catalog
query to retrieve only DTML Document objects.  Likewise, you can create
and index and subsequently perform a query that lets you get at objects
which have an attribute "foo" that starts with the letter "g".  This
kind of granularity is not possible with nonintegrated indexers.

Of course that doesn't mean you can't use htdig or pls to index a Zope
site if that's what you'd like to do...

- C