Acquia Search

14 Responses

• 

  Ted Szukalski | July 4th, 2009 @ 7:04 pm | Reply

  Matt, call me naive but why would you spend all the processing power to encrypt indexed content while this content is intended to be publicly found. Isn’t this what the search is intended for in the first place?
• 

  Dries Buytaert | July 4th, 2009 @ 9:15 pm | Reply

  Technically any CMS should be able to create a plugin for Acquia’s hosted search service. Let me know if you want to give that a try, or if you want to chat a bit about what we have done.
• 

  Matt W | July 4th, 2009 @ 9:40 pm | Reply

  It sounds interesting but I would hope that you would leave intact and continue to improve upon the built-in search for wordpress.org sites. I’m not a big fan of relying on external services for my site and do so sparingly.
  • 

    Matt | July 5th, 2009 @ 10:14 am | Reply

    Yes and there is a Google Summer of Code project on this right now, but as with video processing we’re limited by the resources available to us by default and it’s something that could be fairly efficiently done as a remote service.
• 

  ben_ | July 4th, 2009 @ 10:16 pm | Reply

  Solr and Lucene are so extremly powerfull Open Source Tools. I think they have the potential to change the way we think of Content Management,
• 

  D'Arcy Norman | July 5th, 2009 @ 7:27 am | Reply

  I’m not sure an external (and centralized) search engine is needed – but improvements to the search features built into WordPress would really kick ass. Advanced search? Sort by relevance instead of reverse-chronological dump? Boolean searches? I suppose if those are only possible via Lucene and Solr, then give’r, but a better, more flexible native search would make more sense first.
  • 

    Matt | July 5th, 2009 @ 10:15 am | Reply

    How often do you use advanced search on Google? I never do. What I want is always right at the top.
    • 

      D'Arcy Norman | July 5th, 2009 @ 12:28 pm | Reply

      On google? not very often. But when mining my own blog for info about stuff I’ve done, it would be extremely useful.
      • 

        Matt | July 5th, 2009 @ 1:02 pm | Reply

        Well you can already filter search results by category, tag, author, exclusions, date, almost any piece of metadata that is addressable by WP_Query. I’d be surprised if there wasn’t a plugin UI for it.
    • 

      D'Arcy Norman | July 5th, 2009 @ 12:30 pm | Reply

      if google results were displayed in reverse chronological order, how useful would you find it? google sorts by relevance, which completely changes the value of the results.
• 

  Matt | July 5th, 2009 @ 8:20 pm | Reply

  Here is the aforementioned GSOC project:

  http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search/
  • 

    Matt W | July 6th, 2009 @ 9:19 am | Reply

    Very cool, I had heard about this but lost following it somewhere along the way. Thanks for bringing it back to my attention.
• 

  Adam Kalsey | July 6th, 2009 @ 2:23 pm | Reply

  Ted, not all content is intended to be found by all users. Assuming some amount of access control in the CMS, you’d want access control in the search system as well.

  External search isn’t needed for smaller sites. But once you being to scale to lots of traffic, the built-in CMS search tends not to keep up. Off-loading search to another server, one with data storage and processing power dedicated toward the indexing and retrieval of content, is a quick way to help sites scale. Installing and maintaining those search services, however, is more complex than running your average PHP CMS. Hence the hosted search services.
• 

  Ted Szukalski | July 9th, 2009 @ 3:36 am | Reply

  Adam, point taken. I guess on my blog I have sold my soul to Google and replaced the internal search with Google custom search.

  Personally I’d be more interested in a natural language query to the point where “orange female cat” can also return “ginger feline queen”