Advanced Search

One of the expected feature for 1.0 is a much improved search system.

But what exactly should be improved? This is the place to discuss it and make proposals.

Note that there's currently no development branch dedicated to this topic, but when there will be one, this page can be used to discuss the corresponding implementation details.

As usual with Trac, the challenge is that we're not only searching Wiki pages, but other kind of Trac resources as well: tickets, changesets, etc. Therefore, the result shown should also be adapted to the kind of object retrieved (see e.g. #2859).

A related question is how the TracSearch and the TracQuery should interact, see ​Trac-Dev:333, #1329, #2644.

Indexing

It would probably be a good idea if objects were indexed as they are created/updated. This would obviously improve search performance greatly, and no longer effectively require a full retrieval of the entire DB. This could be optional I guess.

A generic search system would provide components with a means to index content, query the content in a standard way (ie. a decent query language) and refer to this content at a later date (eg. ticket hits would display the ticket in a useful way, with links to specific comments, etc.)

Search Engines

Several search engines could be good candidate for handling the search requests, but probably this should be done in a pluggable way, so that different search engines could be supported.

Among the possible candidates:

• ​Xapian and ​DivmodXapwrap. See also the discussion about using Xapin in MoinMoin: ​MoinMoin:FeatureRequests/AdvancedXapianSearch
• ​PyLucene
• ​Hyper Estraier and ​hype.
• … ?
• There's been some efforts to provide a neutral API for some of the above search engines:
  • ​pyndexter
  • ​merquery