Indexing TWiki

Part of the perceived slowness of TWiki comes from the file based grep text search. A search index would greatly improve the search speed and search feature to offer users.

Comparing Open Source Indexers has review of indexing programs. Swish-e is reviewed favourably.

A Swish-e library is provided to allow embedding Swish-e into your applications for very fast searching. A Perl module is available that provides a standard API for accessing Swish-e. (http://www.swish-e.org/docs/readme.html#key_features)

I noticed that there is a Swish-e add-on: SearchEngineSwishEAddOn. The install instructions seem to be for advanced administrators. I wonder if TWiki developers could put some weight behind this to make (default?) installing easier.

-- ArthurClemens - 11 Mar 2006

Swish-e is certainly a good choice. A possible alternative is SearchEnginePluceneAddOn. From http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october05/morgan/10morgan.html, "unlike Swish-e, Plucene supports multi-byte characters, incremental indexing, and a larger subset of the necessary CQL syntax, namely proximity searching. Additionally, Plucene is more of a toolbox instead of a computer program; it is a set of functions, subroutines, and methods enabling the computer programmer to build their own indexing and searching application. These characteristics make Plucene more flexible but also more complicated."

I do not think that we can replace the existing search with indexed search because we would lose all the power to build TWikiApplications (and have compatibility issues). Offering an indexed search in addition (possibly as default for interactive search) would make sense though. One open question is the additional TWikiSystemRequirements and admin skills needed to install TWiki.

-- PeterThoeny - 12 Mar 2006