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."

Comments

How will this work?

[SeanTobin]

Now, how is this going to work? First off, when I do a search on google there are dozens if not hundreds of PC's involved in various aspects of the search. I get my results in under a second. My computer - although fairly decent itself - is only a mid-tower. There is no way I can support even one PC to assist in searching.

Aside from the logistics problems, where the heck am I going to get the pigeons anyway?

Re:How will this work?

[barcodez]

Now, how is this going to work? First off, when I do a search on google there are dozens if not hundreds of PC's involved in various aspects of the search. I get my results in under a second. My computer - although fairly decent itself - is only a mid-tower. There is no way I can support even one PC to assist in searching.

Having played with and done some work on the open source Nutch search engine I know from experience that you can return search results from ~10,000,000 pages in much less than 1 second on a mid-range desktop. It's all done with indexes in much the same way as relational DB have been doing it for years.

Re:How will this work?

[FlipmodePlaya]

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?

Re:How will this work?

[barcodez]

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.

Re:How will this work?

[shawb]

Oh, this wouldn't be run on pigeons. KDE is of course working on PenguinRank, in which a flock of penguins (volunteers, naturally) would run the analysis. Although one technical difficulty will be in maintaining the cooling systems necessary to keep the penguins at a comfortably temperature.

Re:How will this work?

[Ignignot]

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.

Great.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just as long as they don't call it Koogle.

An updated law.

[gowen]

Once upon a time, the Law Of Software Envelopment was

Every program in development at MIT expands until it can read mail.

Now it appears it needs revising to be

Every program in existence expands until it gains search engine capabilities

Search Engine capabilities : one level below self-awareness

Re:Speaking of bloat...

[BenjyD]

Who said they're adding it to the windowing environment? They're not adding it to KWin.

It'll be part of KDE - where DE stands for Desktop Environment. KDE is much more than a window manager, it's an entire desktop system, so this is the perfect place to add it.

Like Spotlight?

[stealthv]

What exactly is a Google-like search feature? I'm assuming they mean something like Spotlight.

Re:Like Spotlight?

[sultanoslack]

Well, this idea was from my talk at the KDE developers' conference. I actually submitted it just a few days before Spotlight was announced.

Similar, but more pervasive and based on some pretty different models for data collection and ranking. Unfortunately this article hits at a time when there really isn't any reasonable resource for what the plans are, but that should show up somewhere on public mailing lists in the next week or two.

The important differences are that it will be based on a generalized idea linkage inside of the desktop and that it won't be a stand alone tool, but a framework that can be used for having search-centric UIs throughout the desktop.

It was mentioned that this is similar to KMail and JuK at the moment; while I wrote the search code for both of those and that got some of the ideas rolling in my head, this is a pretty big jump from both of those.

wow

[minus_273]

the spotlight is really on KDE right now.. hmm..

Ho hum

[mehaiku]

Somebody wake me up when this has been integrated with various useful reiser4 plugins.

Re:Actual Conference Site

[Geiger581]

Relevant presentation overviews here and here.

Google, and Tao

[ka9dgx]

Google couldn't exist without the internet, and HTML. The reason Google is so good is that they are the best on the planet (except maybe the NSA) at extracting metadata from the internet. The pagerank algorithm lives on links, which don't exist on most people's hard drives. Searching and indexing hard drives, like the "find" in Windows, isn't the same, isn't close, and is very likely to disappoint someone expecting Google quality results.

It's a whole system, the Google/InterNet/Authors... you can't have parts of it standing alone.

--Mike--

Beagle?

[marvin2k]

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.

Re:Beagle?

[OmniVector]

you basically got it right. i just wanted to chime in on one thing. i think apple's solution with tiger is rather inventive. basically there's a low-level system api that hooks into the file system so that changes can be tracked. whenever a file is moved, created, renamed, or changed an event is sent upwards to the mdimporter system. mdimporters basically are little programs that implement a single function which takes a filename, and returns an NSDictionary (i.e. a map, or hash). the mdimporter can register itself with the system for certain file formats.

the coolest thing about this is, you get live updates. so for example, if you have the spotlight search open in the top right and you've searched for "kansas," you can then go into a microsoft word doc and type kansas, then save the file. the file will instantly appear in the spotlight search.

i don't think linux has a solution just yet for live-updates, which is important for the integrity of the indexed data.

Why???

[drmancini]

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 ...

Feature request!

[bahamat]

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.

Google is fast, but not the best for the desktop

[orasio]

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 .

"Google" the new version of "enterprise enabled"?

[Dirk Pitt]

'Seems like just yesterday that every press release for every company had to be loaded with such synergistic words as enterprise-enabled, web-widgeted doo-dads, whether it was really relevant or not. Is Google the next version of this? I can see it now:

Duke Nukem: now with Google-style weapons lookup!

Norton Antivirus: Now with Google-style virus lookup!

AutoCad 2005: Now with Google-style component lookup!

Crazy world. Next thing you know they'll be hooking up lava-lamps to build machines.

Background

[kris]

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.

Where are the breakthroughs?

[wandazulu]

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*.

Re:Where are the breakthroughs?

[Seanasy]

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.

I'm feeling lucky..

[l4m3z0r]

This button will be great, instead of opening *random webpages it will now open random applications...

* note: not actually random, void where prohibited...