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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."
Not only for KDE's but also googles? For example, will they scan inside my oowriter doc for the keywords I'm searching for? What about email? If not, I don't really see the advantage over things like find.
What exactly is a Google-like search feature? I'm assuming they mean something like Spotlight.
So, what's the deal? I actually RTFA'ed, but did I miss something? What will KDE do that ht://Dig and mnogosearch and the like don't? User-friendly setup and use, I suppose.
the spotlight is really on KDE right now.. hmm..
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Somebody wake me up when this has been integrated with various useful reiser4 plugins.
If you don't want to use it, it will likely be possible to disable it. Voila, no bloat. On the other hand, I've always wanted a good way to search within documents / metadata on Linux (KDE in particular) that's integrated with the environment. And yes, before anyone mentions it, I do know about grep and use it daily in my coding but it's not the same. grep can't search through formats other than text, of which there are a lot of (OpenOffice, KOffice, etc formats come to mind). Also I'm sure this feature will be able to utilize KDE's Kfile framework to allow you to search for different characteristics of different file types. Far from being bloat, I think this sounds USEFUL above all. Going out on a limb here, but I think if you combine this with the up and coming ReiserFS4 and its plugins and metadata support, you could have a *really* powerful way to organize your files. But hey, if you don't want that, don't use it. It is OSS after all, there's plenty of choices in desktop environment and applications.
I'm surprised to see so many people complaining. This is my favorite color scheme, and I fail to see how it could possibly be harder to read. The text is black, the body background is white and the header highlights are subtle yet enough to break up the messages. What's so hard to read about it? I like it much better.
Anyway, I sense a demand for a FireFox extension to modify all Slashdot links to point to the slashdot domain with the users' favorite color scheme. I'm not a real developer, but I'll bet it's not too hard...I'll check into it this weekend.
Don't tie it to KDE! Make it KDE independant!
Make it so it can be used from the command prompt. Make it so it can be used from GNOME. Make it so it can be used by other non-de X apps. Make it so it can be used by Apache, or Samba, or anything else running under UNIX.
Even better, make it compatible with Spotlight. The search API's are diagrammed at a low enough level that it might be a part of Darwin and not Aqua and thereby released as Free Software. But if it isn't, Apple is pushing Spotlight very hard and they want developers to get behind it and use it, so the specification should be pretty open and reproducable.
It actually points out that rather than just searching files by name, the new search would let you search something the way you search on google...
i.e. I want to configure my ftp server, so I type in "configure ftp server" and it returns an appropriate help document, or I search "foo" and it will search through my files for that phrase.
that's how I see it working, in any case, not just "find -name filename" because that would be reinventing the wheel...that's what slocate and find are for, or "find files" on the K menu for gui stuff.
There is a nice whitepaper on the future of reiserfs and other filesystems for Mac* and Win* OS. The question is: at what level do you need to implement efficient search capabilities ? Filesystem ? Userspace ? Both ?
This is funny, for sure, but there's a grain of truth there. Longhorn's FS search capabilities are pretty amazing from the demos (including some hands-on time) that I've seen.
b 1.html.
Microsoft had a booth at last year's Borland Developer's Conference, and had basically built a prototype of their file system search running on top of XP. The way it works is actually pretty well described in this interview: http://www.searchengineguide.com/beal/2004/0204_a
Not rocket science, necessarily, but it was very impressive to see it working. Hopefully the KDE developers will take notes.
Keep your friends close.
Keep your enemies in a little jar on your desk.
You would think, but these are the same admins who a) don't bother to check for dupes before posting and b) refuse to make valid HTML in the first place. I mean, c'mon, the work has already been done.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
"Searching for files is fundamentally a user interface feature"
/keyword/"unix file search"
No, programs do it too.
"What other project could it possibly go under?"
It would be nicer if it were part of the filesystem. "Everything is a file" is a powerful concept.
find
Why "google like"? What separates google from other engines is its page-rank algorithm. I hardly think KDE is applying page-rank to local disks (wouldn't make sense). So then, the headline should just read "KDE plans search capability". Whoopdy do.
or BBN had some interesting natural language parsing projects going in the early 90s, but google has shown that "semantic nets plus keywords" winds up being a better way to search hyperlinked data. The problem that I see is that my hard drive isn't hyperlinked, so I don't really WANT a google-like search capability.
--
I always wanted an iPod how about you?
That whole text searching, no-dialogs blurb sounds a lot like The Remembrance Agent, as it plugs into emacs.
I had started coding up a Java-based front-end which monitored the X clipboard buffer, but didn't get very far - lack of time. What little code I did write can be found here.
--The more you know, the less you know.
This idea, while it sounds neat, also suggests that it's trying to keep up with the Spotlight feature of OSX Tiger and Longhorn's whatever-you-call-it. I'm not at all bashing the project, but what I'm curious about is why we haven't seen Linux leading in more advanced features, stuff that would be really advanced out-of-this-world concepts that will, eventually, someday, really advance our idea of computing.
I'm sure that it's being done to some extent, I would think that if you're a Phd doing advanced windowing research, you'd want your platform to be Linux so that you can code it the way you want.
While Linux is the natural choice to use for the breakthrough concepts, I really don't know of any. While Linux has *great* technology, and is definately an OS par excellence, it feels like it's more-or-less keeping up with the Joneses, instead of leading in new ideas and technologies. It's said that everyone waits for Apple to come up with something so that it can be copied. Well, why wait for them?
Maybe there isn't as much research going on as I would think (not being in Academia), or it's more of the "faster-smaller" variety, but when the "next big thing" happens in computing, I hope it is on Linux *first*.
This is a classic case of journalists picking up on keywords (Google) and jumping on them. The article had us screaming with laughter here at akademy the KDE conference. The point is just that it is easier to find things on the web than on your desktop. Files and settings should use search because they have outgrown the heirachical setup. However this is just vapourware for now .
By the way the next version of KDE will be KDE 3.4, branching to KDE 4 when Qt 4 beta is available at the end of the year.
Transcripts from all the talks I went to are at http://conference2004.kde.org/sched-devconf.php.
Jonathan Riddell
"KDE goes for IPO selling 145,233 shares at 1059,342euro each giving KDE a higher market capitalisation than Microsoft and AOL combined."
While we're exploring pedantics, it should be noted that Googol was not a word either, until it was coined about 65 years ago as an example of a non-infinite number that was nonetheless unimaginably large.
Weren't we all slagging of Microsoft for implementing the EXACT same feature in Longhorn, i.e. a databased file system, not all that long ago? But now it's in gnome and kde, it's alright?
Apple did it by putting into place an extremely clever and elegant hack. MS is attempting to do it by rewriting the entire filesystem.
It's the classic agile and fast mindset vs the monolithic authotarian mindset.
evil is as evil does
Not to be more pedantic yet, but what dictionary defines a word as something included in the latest revision of the OED?/p?
Better desktop searching is welcome, but how about something that imposes some order and structure on the data on my machine?
Not in terms of a filesystem, and not in terms of a tool that indexes everything and points a search engine at the index. Rather, I want something that overlays all that and imposes structure and organization on the information and knowledge that is recorded in all the those data.
Having done that, give me the tools to browse and manipulate it.
Gnome's Dashboard seems to be sniffing around the edges of this notion. But I'm thinking of something more significant, something that might potentially represent the user's concept of the machine, relegating filesystens, files, and data formats to lower and less relevant levels.
I.e. computer users do not need to be aware of the actual structure of their hard drive, or how their chips and circuit boards operate, because the OS and other software abstract all that out of the way. Why not bump it up?
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