[Search-l] Any updates?

[Jeremie Miller]

I've been off-net for almost a day, catching up on this yummy thread :)

> Group (a) is working mostly on Grub. The few people who do something
> other than Grub are doing user interface stuff. As far as I know no
> one is working in how to improve search results except from the Grub
> perspective, which IMHO is a necessary but limited approach.

There is the Grub group yes, and there's been a lot of activity  
recently on the new /BEWARE stuff and it's svn repo re.search, but  
there is also Nutch and lots of great work by Dennis progressing on  
2.0: http://wiki.apache.org/nutch/Nutch2Architecture

So, crawling, indexing/searching, and interface/social, all evolving  
in their own ways.

> Group (c) is still doing the usual every day work of adding content,
> removing spam, and trying to organize things a little better. But the
> most important "deliverable" of this group is the policy discussion at
> http://search.wikia.com/wiki/search:Mini_article/Policy_discussion It
> was going well in the beginning but unfortunatly it was abandoned for
> over 1 month.

It might have stalled a little as the newer "editable" interface  
experiments have begun at http://re.search.wikia.com/BEWARE/ which  
raises a lot of new questions, but since it's undergoing lots of  
change it's hard to have a stable discussion around it.  I think/hope  
it's settling down a little though and perhaps we should start to push  
that policy discussion again taking it into account?

> PROBLEM:  communication between groups (a), (b) and (c) is still poor.
> Group (a) attemped to improve the communication by broadcasting their
> changelog but that information is only understandable by people who
> are familiarized enough with the code, and not by the other groups.

> .....
> Why is it not working as it should? As much as projects like this
> aren't supposed to have hierarquies, when there are that many people
> involved we need some people who have the authority to act as leaders
> to point directions for each group so that they can work together for
> a common goal. A "Benevolent Dictator" wouldn't be a bad idea.

Yeah, it's an odd project in general when it comes to comms, so many  
different types of people and everyone likes to use different  
tools :)  Mailing lists, wiki/talk pages, IM, IRC, code, *grin*.

I don't mind the decentralization right now, "search" is a big space  
and it might be harmful to try to wrangle everything together.  I'm  
really excited about the progress being made, even if it's happening  
slowly and in little pockets here and there.

> Well, maybe I'm wrong, but that is my point of view. And to conclude,
> I'd like to share with you Gartner's Hype Cycle:
> http://banix.info/docs/wikiahypecycle.gif
> It should explain why things have been a bit quiet compared to a few  
> months ago.

Very cool, thanks Bani!

Jer