[Search-l] Widgets

[Jimmy Wales]

I am 100% focussed on widgets as the "next big thing" for Wikia search. 
  We have a lot of bugfixes and refinements going on... and the toolbar 
is starting to look pretty amazing too.  But I share Markie's view that 
the widget framework is going to be a killer app.

The basic concept, I think I need help with some technical details, most 
of which will have to come from internal people like Jer.  But I also 
have some general thoughts and questions which I think a lot of people 
will be able to help with.

Basically, what I am wanting to see is a very very simple api that will 
let boring crappy programmers like me come up with some neat ideas and 
actually code them up quickly.

The idea is: you match on certain regular expressions (though for 
performance reasons we probably can not support full regex) and return 
an "object" which might be a specialized search box, a grid of data, 
whatever.

For example:

'92109 weather'
'weather 92109'
'san diego weather'
'weather san diego'

should return... something, the best and most free thing we can return.

And 'SFO to LAX' should return a specialized search object, like what 
google does...

The idea is this:

1. Ordinary programmers can upload triggers (either lists of keywords 
or... ??? how broad and computational can we make this?)

2. And those triggers call subroutines which return "objects"

3. And the community/staff decide which of these are returned "by 
default" for all users... but anyone can also go into advanced 
preferences and add the widgets experimentally that we collectively 
think are "not ready for prime time".

--Jimbo