[Zope-dev] Search Features and Zope Directions Road Map

[Ausum]

Zope is a great application server, the same as its soon to be released Content
Management Framework, because of  its bet on Python, everybody say it.
Nevertheless, after reading the Directions Roadmap from DC, I was surprised that
a substantial improvement of the searching features of Zope, wasn't mentioned as
a major concern.

For a new Zope enthusiast like me, it is a kind of addiction to arrange and
administer content while taking the learning curve. Almost everybody in this
list with a non-programming background might've experimented this. But when I
arrived to the search features of ZCatalog, I got mixed feelings. (Right now I'm
stuck on this OR indexes searching :)  )

The fact is that - according to my strong belief - everybody uses more Google to
look for Zope Site's content than Zope's own Zcatalog's search engine. Moreover,
everybody uses more Google to look for everything, bypassing windows, doors, and
portals!. Why? Because it's terribly smart (not mentioning its 6,000 Linux
boxes, by the way), and because there's no need to follow the highly-engineered
information architecture of a web site, if there's a trustful shorcut to the
relevant content!. So, if I'd have to mention one big feature improvement to
Zope, I wouldn't doubt: "search engine".

I just wanted to point on this subject. I know Zope isn't about spidering and
retrieving, but it should have "Greater Search Capabilities" as a title, within
that roadmap.  :)



Ausum



p.d.   Right now I'm quite interested at the technology of searching and finding
non structured content, in order to compose structured documents. For example,
the guys at Vignette (StoryServer) say that its customers don't need to keyword
anything in order to have a "related content" section. After the writer finishes
a story, (possibly while) a routine by Autonomy (www.autonomy.com) reads the
document and finds out what the document is about, and so it triggers a search
for related content within the site, without the need of intervention by the
writer.  (For the curious, Autonomy has published a personal version of its
software. It's called Kenjin (www.kenjin.com) ). On the other hand, Fast, from
Norway, already have a nice multimedia search engine, from regular,
non-structured, spidered web pages. Can we do that "structuring the
unstructured" thing within Zope?