Searching again...

[Kevin Fenzi]

So, I got to looking at search engines again the other day. In
particular the horrible horrible mediawiki one we are using on the
wiki. 

This pointed me to sphinx. 

- There is a mediawiki sphinx plugin. (needs packaging)
- sphinx is c++ and already packaged. 
- sphinx uses mysql directly to index the database contents. 
- You can pass other data into it via an xml format. This could be a
  pain for any non wiki setups. 

It was noted that the new tagger application uses xapian as it's search
engine. 

- xapian is also c++
- xapain has a web crawler/indexer (omega) that could index our other
  stuff more easily than sphinx. 
- There's no mediawiki plugin for xapian, but we could point the wiki
  search box to a site wide search using xapian. 

So, there's tradeoffs either way. 

Would anyone care to lead an effort to test these two? 
xapian would probably be easy to test from anywhere. 
sphinx might require some access to our mediawiki database, but you
could also just setup a new mediawiki, the plugin and sphinx and see
how it works there. 

If no one steps up I can look at doing it next week. ;) 

kevin