[Search-l] Sorry to do this but its coming, yes a rant :-(

[Mark (Markie)]

many thanks for this post, this is the kind of stuff i like to hear :-D  i
dont mind spurts and lulls, even expect them, but if we could have an
indication of spurts, or little tasters of whats to come.. :-D

and as for the lunatics, welll ill join you there :-p  /me will bring the
straight jackets?

thanks

mark

On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 1:49 AM, jer <jeremie at jabber.org> wrote:

> Ask my kids would say, "burrrrrn!" ;-)
>
> I feel and share your frustration, I know at least for my part I've
> done a poor job keeping going a steady stream of updates on the
> things I've been playing with.  Of course, I've never personally been
> good at regularity, tend to step back and push things out in
> spurts... all I can do though is try to catch up for the last month
> or so of various chaotic activities.
>
> First, Grub is partially stalled right now as we began in Feb the
> migration to the NG version, who's server side is back-ended by
> hbase, a very alpha open source bigtable clone written atop hadoop.
> That process has been painfully sputtery, a cluster of ~7 servers is
> maxing out at a few mil docs, not nearly good enough to push GrubNG
> to grow significantly.  Just last week though I think I came up with
> a way to partially work around the challenges of using hbase before
> it's ready, so with luck in the next week or so we can get that
> distributed crawler growing again :)
>
> I mentioned Grub/hbase first as while working on it I spent the time
> to really think about the bigtable model with hbase and how we can
> use it, I even went so far as to design and build a system I called
> KT (for Keyword Tuple, it's in the re.search svn repo), that should
> be able to scale up while supporting a huge variety of really
> exciting features.  I even prototyped an implementation of both the
> server and a search result interface with a bunch of features which
> those that I IM with regularly have seen.  I've hesitated to show it
> off to a wider audience as the prototype was both horribly insecure
> and unusable unless someone showed you first.
>
> There's a light at the end of the tunnel though, I've attached a pdf
> of a ROUGH DRAFT that I hope we can actually let everyone start
> playing with in as little as a week.  Here's a quick list of the
> various features that KT will be enabling in our search results:
>
>        - add new result
>        - edit any result's title/summary (and see revisions, revert)
>        - highlight any single result as the best one
>        - star ratings (already exist)
>        - delete/trash any result (leaves the title but grey'd out, can be
> undeleted easily)
>        - full change history for that set of results, and rss feed to
> watch
> for changes
>        - add comments to any result
>        - select text, images, or input forms from the target site to be
> shown below it's search result
>        - alternative related searches and did-you-mean (user driven)
>        - custom backgrounds in the header for given searches
>
> I've found myself doing a bunch of these things because it's simply
> *fun*, so if anyone just can't wait and is willing to suffer through
> some UI or random breakage pain, just ping me on IM and I can
> accommodate some you've-been-warned early access to play.
>
> It's possible to do lots more than what's above as well, KT is a very
> simple and flexible framework.
>
> Besides helping with the things above, I know Dennis and Seth have
> been working hard on improving the index, the result quality has
> improved significantly and our infrastructure/systems are a lot
> healthier than how they ended up in the mad rush to get it ready for
> that crazy first week (we did 5mil queries the first day and didn't
> break, not bad).
>
> As a reminder in general though, this is overall a long term project,
> there's going to be lulls and storms.  It's also a pretty insane
> project, and insane people seem to be rather poor organizers and
> communicators, lots will be broken and go un-addressed for way too
> long, guess we're well on track for something :)
>
> Jer
>
> On Mar 26, 2008, at 5:13 PM, Mark (Markie) wrote:
>
> > Right, im afraid the time has come once again where i have been
> > wondering to my self again, and i feel that things need to be said,
> > so here they are.
> >
> > *Whats happening with the project.  AFAIK overall (and i know
> > somethings have happened) but *very* little seems to have happened
> > since the launch.  Now i know that things are probably happening
> > with the team, but any chance of actually telling the users about
> > this, cos its not looking good from here atm.
> >
> > Ive copied in the so called pillars of search
> >
> > Transparency - riiiiiiight :-(
> > Community - hmmm contribute to stale projects?
> > Quality - well....
> > Privacy - hmm yes that seems to have been done to an extent ( by
> > the community mind)
> >
> > Ive been on the project since dec 2006, and so have been waiting
> > along time for this to happen, so its not purely a case of i want
> > everything to happen NOW, i just want it to look like SOMETHING
> > will happen SOON.
> >
> > *This brings me onto the next topic of where is the project
> > going??? There has been practically no progress, and frankly i cant
> > see much being done from my point.  The launch has happened, many
> > people were interested, contributed but have now left, because
> > NOTHING has happened. so overall the net gain of launching the
> > project?? bad press and a few (relative to the web) minis.
> >
> > *Many things have been promised by various people, which havent
> > happened. Most specifically this has come from a certain member of
> > staff, one specifically, that has said that they will do many
> > things, but even the most basic of tasks seem to have not happened.
> > so Broken/missed promises. Well iirc (name here) said he would make
> > sure that the about pages etc were created, hmm... (http://
> > alpha.search.wikia.com/about.html in case you forgot where those
> > were).  This is a wikia project, any chance of getting ANY
> > involvement/input/co-ordination from the team who, ultimately, want
> > us to make them more successfull and a profit (if were being frank).
> >
> > Now i know i havent been that active recently on the wiki, but i
> > have been reading the mailing lists and talking in irc, but the
> > main reason for me not being active on the wiki, is mainly the fact
> > that i just dont have the motivation to do anything because of the
> > above.  Frankly atm its a stale project, but hopefully this rant
> > (which i hate doing) will mean that the project will hopefully
> > become better.
> >
> > If i have offended anyone above then i am sorry, but i feel that
> > certain things need to be said right now, in order to make the
> > project better, which is my aim.
> >
> > Many thanks and look forward to the responses to this, especially
> > from wikia staff
> >
> > Regards
> >
> > mark
> >
> > (user:Markie)
>
>
>
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