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Attractive Open Source Search Interfaces?
An anonymous reader writes "I work for a company that manages an online database for the political market. We add to this DB daily with updates from a variety of sources and our customers then search through this content via our Solr/Lucene search engine. My problem is, our search interface is a little, well, basic and I would love to know if there are any feature-rich open source alternatives out there. The only one I can find is Flamenco, and while that seems strong on categorisation, that seems to be about the height of it."
Sphinx Search works quite well, is very fast and can handle very large datasets.. Only down side is the indexes are not live.. http://www.sphinxsearch.com/
MABASPLOOM!
... for offline viewing and searching.
<input type="text" name="q" title="Enter your search terms"
<input type="submit" value="Search" title="Submit your search request"
</form>
Anything more complex will probably aggravate your users.
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
I found Sphider and it fulfills my needs. -P
Free solution from Yahoo/IBM -- http://omnifind.ibm.yahoo.net/
Contrary to popular belief, Ask Slashdot, even when asking questions about Open Source free alternatives, is not an open invitation to bash Microsoft.
Please rephrase your comment in the form of something helpful.
We express our sincerest apologies for the confusion.
Anonymously,
Mr. Coward
I've used Swish in it's variants since it was an alternative to WAIS.
http://www.swish-e.org/
Just curious, what's 'political market' ? Is it really that bad already?
>I just wish there was a button labeled "Complain to Windows development about this feature and why it sucks".
There is, it's the "Buy" button next to a Mac on the Apple website.
Wish I had the money to burn for one of those babies
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
Are you talking about searching web pages or a database and presenting the results as web pages? If the latter, then wht's the database?
I wouldn't say that GIMP is more complex than Photoshop. I've tried using Photoshop, and it looks like an unorganized muddle of garbage to me. I *get* GIMP, though.
Linux is just another Unix, but thankfully, a bit more modern and progressive than many of the others. It's as complex as it needs to be, and no more....that's not taking into account the various windowing environments of various qualities (although Windows 7's interface reminds me more of Gnome than it does Windows XP, somehow).
Then again, maybe I'm weird. My two cents.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Well, the OSX license agreement says that it can only be installed on an "Apple-labeled" device. My interpretation of that is to put an Apple sticker on the side of a Hackintosh.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
...a flatfile with regexps? ;)
One line per entry, index at the beginning.
P.S.: No, I‘m not totally serious... or am I? ;)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
http://project.carrot2.org/ This plugin is part of the Nutch app now (which does a nice job of search since it uses Lucene) but I've also used it with Solr. Check it out, it's pretty interesting.
fak3r.com
What I want is a GUI showcase. A website with GUIs from movies, industrial machines, web pages, etc. I have never seen a good one. Yet I have seen some very cool interfaces over the years. Sometimes you see movies where the police criminal database or whatnot could only have been built with a team of highly paid graphic artists. If anyone knows about this please reply with a link.
You can write an extremely fast and powerful (b)ash cgi-script using a properly compiled snapshot of busybox (it will call builtin find, sed, grep... which is much faster than calling separate programs) If you run it on a static webpage using busbox httpd as the server it can even be a function within your server script.
#!/PATH_TO/sh
search()
{
#your code here
}
advanced_search()
{
#your code here
}
restart_server()
{
#your code here
}
Hyper Estraier has a Google-like interface that has some additional features such as including regular expressions in your queries.
OS Reviews: Free and Open Source Software
YUI has a BSD style license and is really nice for building cross browser friendly user interfaces.
The downside of YUI is that the CSS does not validate as it uses the "holly hack" to do IE specific stuff instead of an if define in the header and a separate IE stylesheet.
I know people that like blueprint, you might also check out http://www.webdesignbooth.com/10-promising-css-framework-that-worth-a-look/ and see if any of these meet your needs.
Work bio at MMWD
Hi, there's also VisiNav which lets you assemble complex queries over data, covering keyword search and faceted browsing (as Flamenco) and a bit more (path navigation). Drag and drop UI, where people who don't know facets or path navigation can do keyword search without being distracted. -- Andreas. Disclaimer: I'm one of the developers of VisiNav.
Although non open source, it's free version has most of the features. http://www.dbsight.net/ It also has many more sophisticated features that you can dig out.
Disclaimer as I have used these guys recently for a solr search project - but not affiliated in any way - and their product is very good. Twigkit: http://www.twigkit.com/ gives you a very slick and simple way to make attractive front ends to solr (or other search engines). For us it was the best of both worlds, as we were able to save by leveraging solr, but then add the stuff these guys brought to the table to really round the whole thing off. In a couple of days they gave us a very slick UI that killed the crappy prototype one we had managed to build!
It says "Apple-branded", i.e a machine that Apple has branded with... Well, an Apple. Not one that you've slapped a sticker on.
-- Linux user #369862
I've posted a blog entry in response to this topic here: http://www.lucidimagination.com/blog/2010/01/14/solr-search-user-interface-examples/ There are several technologies to tinker with, though it's tough to find UI frameworks that fit ones needs exactly. But there should be plenty of food for thought in my blog entry. Please comment there if you have other technologies worth pointing out to the Solr communities.
Although a competitor product, and if it is definitely open source that you are looking for rather than richer-featured proprietary solutions, take a look at Ontopia Open Source, a "subject-centric" alternative to classic text-string based search engines. It uses the ISO 13250 Topic Maps standard which encapsulates all subjects, associations and related data in XML. All engines using the Topic Maps standard are particularly strong in faceted classification, handling complex queries and query classes and, by its nature, offers a user interface that allows user to intuitively move from subject to subject
I agree, Flamenco's faceted metadata is a great way to look at structured data. But Solr has facets, and they're really easy to enable. So that kind of functionality is not really the hard part.
The really tricky part is finding out what your users need (which is of course not what they say they need).
Use your search logs: the most important part is seeing what they search for and especially if they have zero results. Talk to them about why: they may have different vocabulary or need something new, or it may be OK because they're checking for the absence of something. You can also look at what are the top queries and the top kinds of queries: maybe they really want to segment by assembly district: that's a great use for faceted metadata.
Then you can use the standard UI tools like sketches and wireframes to expand the search form for their needs. They may want to search for nicknames or maiden names, who knows? I don't, but they do.
It's an iterative process involving content coverage, back-end search functionality, and client-side interfaces, but when you do it right, it just hums :-)