Allow search also in revisions

Add a checkbox and functionality in advanced search on WebSearch to allow also to include revisions in search.

This would allow to search for specific themes even when they were factored out.

-- WolfgangSlany - 01 Jan 2004

Comments

This looks tricky to implement correctly efficiently. (eg searching for topics containing purple fine section in earlier revisions might not get the hits you expect with grep due to searching only the diffs. (assuming grepping the ,v files)

In order to support this actually having a proper search engine, rather than grep, would probably be beneficial. One way would be to build an inverted index, that not only pointed at the topics themselves but also at specific revisions. That way you could ask which topics have discussed purple fine section at any point in their history.

Building an inverted index isn't that difficult to do either. As a side effect, you would probably speed things up for the general case as well.

-- MS - 07 Feb 2004