00206: Summary of search results should contain some indication of what is actually on the page.

Summary: Summary of search results should contain some indication of what is actually on the page.
Created: 2004-12-03 22:36
Status: Suspended
Category: Feature
From: Brian?
Assigned:
Priority: 55555 543
Version: Any
OS: Any

Description: It would be a very good thing if the search results displayed a short summary of each page-- be it a sentence with the match, or the first few sentences of the content-- so that the person doing the searching doesn't have to visit each and every result in order to find what they were looking for (if they find it at all). Most excellent WikiEngine, but the search feature leaves something to be desired.


See the thread that begins at http://pmichaud.com/pipermail/pmwiki-users_pmichaud.com/2004-September/006600.html for more about including excerpts from the pages searched. I'll be glad to implement it if it's not too complex, but I haven't figured out how the module should decide what text to display in response to the search.

--Pm


What Radu mentions would be a good choice, I think. Possibly include 5 to 10 words surrounding the keyword. Multiple keyword matches would be split by "...". How much of a speed impact would this have on searching? Have you tried something similar already that wasn't quite good enough?

--Brian?


I've moved the votes from PITS:00564 to this page. --Pm November 21, 2005, at 10:09 AM


Profiles April 05, 2006, at 05:43 AM If a page contains (:description:) or (:keywords:) this should be contained. Jiri


The sentence with the match in it is what we really need; the #teasers format can give the start of the matched page, but that doesn't always help. We need something more in line with what people are expecting from search results nowadays: an exerpt from the matched page, with the matching term highlighted. I don't know if this would have to be incorporated into the core code or whether a cookbook add-on for a new fmt= format would be enough. Kathryn Andersen


Check out TextExtract -- it gives the context from the page in lots of different ways and can be configured to be used in place of the default search. --Peter Bowers May 24, 2010, at 02:52 PM