[racket-dev] Potential search improvement

About two weeks ago, Michael Wilber wrote:
> I just noticed something about the way I use search.
> 
> Just now, I wanted to find the reference docs that describe
> threads. So I typed "thread" into the search box and got
> documentation about the (thread ...) form, in both the old and new
> search pages.
> 
> But the reference describes "Threads", not "thread", so as soon as I
> thought to add the final "s" to my query, the new search immediately
> pulled the correct document up. (This is a big improvement on the
> old search, which presented me with "call-with-killing-threads" and
> "callbacks for blocked threads" and so forth.)
> 
> Should search take such common suffixes into account?

This would be very difficult to do right, since the search is
generally aimed at looking for identifiers, and not at the kind of
full-text searching that you get with web search engines.

(In the long term, I think that it's best to encourage using the
documentation on-line, which means that we can hook onto our search
server, or google, etc for such searches.)

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