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KDE Plans 'Google-like' Search Capabilities
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."
Why put this in a WINDOWING ENVIRONMENT? I mean, if he wants to do a project like this, graet! Just dont do it under a desktop banner.
--Kevin
No I will not divorce my good old grep and find for some "google like" :p
I'm wondering why they're saying it's 'Google like'. Do they just mean 'search engine like', and got caught up in the brand name (like they do with the iPod so frequently)? Or is there something about it comparable only to a Google technique?
I would think that bitching about it in a article discussion isn't the way to go about getting it changed.
perhaps an email or two to the admins would be of more use.
It's a whole system, the Google/InterNet/Authors... you can't have parts of it standing alone.
--Mike--
To many people google == search engine. The word is in the Oxford English Dictionary ffs. So like xerox, hoover and escalator the brand name has become (is becoming) the generic word too.
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Please somebody tell me that they will cooperate with the Beagle project on this and don't reinvent the wheel yet again. It would be a real pain in the ass to have too indexes wasting your hd space which basically do the same thing.
That's the main question ... in my opinion features like this should be developed as close to the FS as possible ...
And if they want to create something like this on a higher level (meaning FS independent and all that stuff ...) why not just create a simple GUI for locate?
I mean it's clearly a similar indexing feature and IMHO the work involved shold rather be invested in future FS development ...
Never underestimate the power of idiots in large groups
Okay. I think this is a great idea. Everyone that has seen how windows will work post-longhorn, how OSX works today, can see that the filesystem hierarchy metaphor is, thank god, on its way out.
But, this has to be done well. I mean, this has to be not desktop implementation centric, but filesystem/kernel centric. That is, in order for this to work really well, you need a filesystem that can categorize files and search through them efficiently (almost like a database).
Reiser4 may be able to do this, WinFS will do this (will have a mssql core), and if this all means a neat kde interface to locate or an extra indexing service, it will suck on linux.
So. It would be really cool if they put it up in freedesktop.org as an RFC so that the whole community may get involved. This cannot be the sole effort of KDE if it is to work well.
NO SIG
it is quite pretty--mmm, gradients--but every link on the page is light brown on white, and article title is in a gradient, which is dark enough at the top but winds up being white-on-light-brown by the bottom. White + light brown = low contrast. Maybe my monitor's a bit bright, maybe my gamma is off, or maybe my eyes are bad, but like you said, I'm hardly alone. No sense mentioning people with actual visual disabilities.
Even Apple, supposed masters of great design, recognize a loser when they see one--after all, they eventually dumped that round mouse, right?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
From the article:
Paul Salazar, the European marketing director at Red Hat, said his company has chosen to focus on Linux on the server rather than on the desktop, due to the fact that it cannot compete with Microsoft's research and development budget.
This is a pretty odd statement coming from a corporation with all its eggs in the Open Source basket. One would normally expect a company to believe in the superiority of its chosen business model.
Surely it's an article of faith that the "virtual equivalent R&D budget" of the FOSS community is hundreds of times greater than Microsoft's corporate R&D budget, and our R&D manpower is thousands of times larger. What FOSS lacks (comparatively) is strong product focus, but many would say that that is a good thing.
Is RedHat having second thoughts, or was this just an unfortunate individual comment from a marketting droid?
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
To be honest it looks like a gimmick. The reason for the commands in Googles search is because your narrowing down literally billions of pages of crap. You dont particularly need that flexability with an O/S search facility. I have found pretty much all I need with current functionality. Whats more important is the speed of the search being attempted but they are building on top of the standard search facility. If anything it may even slow it down.
As for its comparison to WinFS if MS get it right. Which is more likely than many would have you believe (especially cause they get bitched at with good reason for there current facilities.) WinFS is built from scratch and will likely be superior to this project. If only in the way that it far surpasses there current search.
Well, thank you for your insight.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Yes, I'm a little unsure why they mentioned "google like" search. My point was that there is a place for more advanced search than just find.
Well. I dont think it should be as close to the files system as possible. .ps.gz files and scan them, using the newest pdf library to index pdf files, read the compressed staroffice format, ect...
I want to search engine to index my html files, expand
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
It sounds like they're just capitalizing on a buzz word. Google's big claim to fame is that their search algorithm looks at the links between pages in addition to the pages themselves. Files on your hard drive, for the most part, aren't linked between each other (aside from stuff like source code), so the Google comparison is fairly bogus.
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
This is of course the kind of knee jerk reaction that any programmer would think of when confronted with the problem. You can already see it implemented in windows. Of course, every user's first reaction is to disable the searching because no one cares about fast searches of their computer, and everyone cares about their system resources. So this is a terrible tradeoff.
OTOH I think Hans Reiser has it right, just look at his vision. Built search from the filesystem up, and it will revolutionize how we think of data.
I submitted this story last night, and it didn't get posted.
The article in N&T is based on ideas by Scott Wheeler (and Till Adam, and Aaron Seigo and others). See Beyond Hierarchical Data: Search and Meta Data as Fundamental Interface Elements, Scotts lecture on query-based interfaces at aKademy.
"Google like" here means just "searching", but the result will in fact be more like WinFS than Google in that it is using file data and file metadata to index and find things. Interface-wise expect more quicksearch bars like the one in Kmail 1.7 (KDE 3.3.0, Till Adam) and JuK (Scott Wheeler).
See also a Blog entry of mine (german language) in the same vein.
IMHO, KDE should be moving toward better functionality and ease of use for the desktop then writing Google into it. I understand the desire to dominate the world, but I don't think the basics are quote covered yet.
:)
The functionality of the K-apps and how loosely they integrate (and don't integrate with anything else) is at about MS Office 95 level.
I see searchings importance on a scale of 1 to 10 at about a 3. Most users I know have everything in one folder, maybe a couple of nested folders and that's it. Not too hard to find stuff if there's one or two places to look.
-m
PS: Was there an article to read?
http://www.invisik.com
This is where file storage, at least at the level where users interact with it, should be headed. I think file managers should be more like Google.
/home/user/photos/Christmas should be distinct from /home/user/Christmas/photos. I should be able to type in either path and get the same result set.
Hierarchical trees are horrible ways to manage data, especially if it's a bunch of data that can be classified multiple ways and you typically won't remember everything you save.
There's no reason why
This would solve a lot of the hassle of organizing files. The only choice I'd have to make is how specific I want to get when choosing file names and directories.
Indexing of file contents is an added plus, but not even necessary for a huge gain in organization.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
You need to ratchet up your pedantry even further. There is no specific group or organization charged with deciding what is or is not part of the English language. While the Oxford English Dictionary bears a great deal of prestige, and their decisions can be taken as strong evidence of the "wordiness" of google(verb), there is no single litmus test for inclusion/exclusion of a word from the English language.
:)
Now, the French have an entire division of the government devoted to defining the French language, with expectedly hilarious results. Use your preferred search engine to google for "couriel".
Maybe it's best to keep English a little loose.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
No doubt.
When I hear a middle aged waitress (who's not known to be especially computer savvy) use the term "google" as a verb--and in the right context--well, let's just say that google has become a word. Just like xerox, kleenex, or any other widely used trademarks.
Welcome to our lexicon, the word "google".
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
I don't think Linux is a natural choice for breakthrough concepts in user interfaces. It is in lots of other areas and maybe in more basic research in UI but it's not user driven as much as OS X and Windows.
Both KDE and Gnome are good at constantly progressing, trying new things. And they're good at listening to users. But, I think they don't have the pressure/motivation and resources right now to come up with something truly novel.
I would guess that this partly because they're under some pressure to provide the functionality in OS X or Windows. They're playing catch-up almost constantly. Also, their flexibility seems to slow them down. There were big changes in Gnome 2.0 but they seemed more like a change in direction than movement forward. My impression of KDE is that they put most effort in the backend of the system where you're not likely to notice it. And both projects work hard to try to make everyone happy.
My impression of Apple is that Apple (Jobs) likes to think big picture and then throw lot of effort behind a handful of projects. The media hub picture spawned the iApps and iPod. The interface picture birthed Expose, Spotlight and that widget thing. MS seems to try to do (or at least promise) everything then implement it poorly, then keep plugging away at it until they get it right or give up. But they do get it right sometimes and they do try make things a 'better experience' for the user. I personally think they miss the mark more times than not because they burden their innovations with user-hostile elements like DRM.
OSS needs visionaries but to implement a vision you need everyone to get behind it. I think that's harder in OSS because visionaries seem a bit dictatorial. It's not impossible, I'm sure, but going from a mainly academic research project to something people can use is hard and probably needs a steady guiding hand.
We found that the implementation was quite effective at revealing the most important software entities within source code projects we were familiar with. This is a tool that could easily be included as part of documentation tools such as JavaDoc and Doxygen, giving the ability to list member functions or classes in order of "importance".
Finally, the inclusion of a bias vector in the pagerank algorithm allows the ranking of software entities in importance relative to some other entity, so you could get a listing of those classes which are most important in interacting with a particular class you're interested in.
Since we handed in the project, this has been going nowhere. I would love to see somebody pick up on this idea (I don't have the time), since I believe it has a lot of potential. We do have some documentation material, as well as an implementation in C#, which I can pass on to interested parties. Drop me a line at rstorjoh at sfu dot ca.
KDE is an open project. If some people want to work on a new feature, how does that have a negative effect on the rest of the environment? It's not like programmers are being "stolen" away from what they are doing to work on this -- it's open source for crying out loud!
And you need to crank yours up even more. The OED is accepted by many institutions to define the English language. Words in use that are not in the OED are considered slang and/or technical language. While you are correct that there is no royally or federally defined definitive language, the OED is, by common agreement, the definition of the language.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
The grandparent said "by definition" not "by authoritative body"