[racket-dev] Potential search improvement

About two weeks ago, Jens Axel Søgaard wrote:
> 
> A quick note: I searched for "Scribble" and didn't get the main
> manual. The reason is that is named:
> 
>      "Scribble: The Racket Documentation Tool  in scribble"
> 
> This case could be solved by renaming it:
>      "Scribble - The Racket Documentation Tool  in scribble"
> 
> Or by stripping punctuation in manual titles.

I think that it's best to do the stripping for the inex when
generating it (right now, the index string for that is "scribble: the
racket documentation tool").  But I'm not sure about it, since you
might also look for "scribble:" and expect it to appear.  So perhaps
it's better to just have some flag saying which index entries are
identifiers.


> I am undecided on the following:
> Try a search for list. The results are a bunch of places where list
> is exported from.
> 
> It would be nice to see the these more prominently displayed:
> 
>    List Filtering  in reference
>    List Iteration  in reference
>    List Iteration from Scratch  in guide
>    List Operations  in reference
> 
> It won't take long, before 20 modules export list, and the
> reference and guide results disappear from the front page.

I don't see a good way around this one.  It's the same problem of not
having an ordering for the displayed results, because even if there's
a different placement for occurrences in titles there would still be a
problem with less important titles that have "list" in them (eg, "List
of incompatibilities"), and common title words would interfere with
bindings that use these words.

(Another option is some additional search operator, like something
that requires that the result is in a section title, but I think that
almost nobody is using these operators anyway.)

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!