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KDE Plans 'Google-like' Search Capabilities

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the slocate-not-good-enough-for-ya dept.

CoolFX writes "Developers of KDE have announced plans to simplify searching for files on the open-source Linux desktop environment by adding a Google-style search feature. The next version of KDE, which will either be called 3.4 or 4, is expected to include the new search feature... Aaron Seigo, a KDE developer, said the community has already been discussing and writing code for the new search engine at the KDE Community World Summit."

1 of 356 comments (clear)

  1. Google is fast, but not the best for the desktop by orasio · · Score: 5, Informative

    What I would like to see, is the speed of google, adapted for the user. The web metaphor justifies going to a text-box, and hitting Enter, but I'm not willing to do that just to look into a page. That's why incremental search is so successful. Maybe it would be nice to implement better metodologies, that have already been proposed. Just because the Google interface is good for the web, it doesn't mean it's good for the local machine. Maybe it would be nice to go to one of the sources of recent improvements (incremental searching) and implement what he suggests, in its full form.

    from Jef Raskin's
    The Humane Interface


    Part II: WHAT INTERFACES SHOULD HAVE

    A useful starting set of solutions to the problems outlined above includes

    * A better text search methodology, effective both within a local document or system and with respect to extremely large data spaces such as the web
    * A method of eliminating all modal aspects of the basic human-machine interface, a method that is readily learned by newcomers and which is habituating
    * An improved navigation method, as applicable to finding your way around within a picture or memo as within a collection of images, documents, or networks; a method which makes use of inborn and learned human navigational skills
    * A set of detail improvements to some existing mechanisms that make them consistent with the goals and principles of the rest of the design.

    Better text searching requires that the search be extremely fast (the next instance appears within human reaction time), interactive at the typed character (or spoken morpheme) level, and not based on dialog box interaction. You should be able to change the pattern (what you are seeking an instance of) at any time, including during a search. The results should be shown in context and not as a list of documents or sites. A search mechanism that is sufficiently fast and powerful also can serve as a cursor positioning mechanism in text. Such a cursor positioning tool can be significantly faster than graphical pointing devices and can unify local and internetworked information retrieval.

    -------------

    Well, maybe KDE is not the right project to do that, and I should shut up and help with the project Jef Raskin himself has started, and is slowly being developed, The Humane Environment .