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[ANN] houston - yet another gemini search engine

1. kristof (k (a) kvn.dev)

Hi there,

I just created gemini://houston.coder.town

It's a very, very barebones search at this time.

Features are:
  * Very simple
  * Returns parts of the text where your search matches

Plans:
  * More advanced search methodology
  * Better and more exhaustive indexing

It uses a custom client and server. There's probably still a bunch of
bugs.

Let me know what you think.

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2. Luke Emmet (luke.emmet (a) gmail.com)

On 20-May-2020 22:55, kristof wrote:
> I just created gemini://houston.coder.town
>
> It's a very, very barebones search at this time.
>
> <snip>
>
> It uses a custom client and server. There's probably still a bunch of
> bugs.
>
> Let me know what you think.

It seems to work well - it is nice to see some snippets coming back, not 
just the path/filename.

A couple of minor thoughts for your consideration

1. Would be useful to have a link at the top of each results page to 
allow user to refine their search

2. Might be better UI to display snippets as bullets. That way clients 
that prettily handle them will be able to show them nicely. I dont think 
it matters to enumerate them 1 to 5.

3. Is there a way for the user to lengthen the snippets, perhaps there 
could be some alternative URLs that allow longer or shorter results shown.

4. Maybe there needs to be some pagination of the results if too many 
are shown, or maybe that is not a problem yet...

otherwise - keep up the good work!

  - Luke

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3. kristof (k (a) kvn.dev)

On 20/05/21 12:25AM, Luke Emmet wrote:

> It seems to work well - it is nice to see some snippets coming back, not
> just the path/filename.

Ye, I wanted to be able to show where the 'match' comes from, so people
can judge in a more informed way if it's relevant.

> A couple of minor thoughts for your consideration
>
> 1. Would be useful to have a link at the top of each results page to allow
> user to refine their search

Sure, makes sense

> 2. Might be better UI to display snippets as bullets. That way clients that
> prettily handle them will be able to show them nicely. I dont think it
> matters to enumerate them 1 to 5.

I'll have to read the gemini spec again :P

> 3. Is there a way for the user to lengthen the snippets, perhaps there could
> be some alternative URLs that allow longer or shorter results shown.

That should be easily done, in principle I could also allow the
modification of the number of highlights returned (currently max 5).

> 4. Maybe there needs to be some pagination of the results if too many are
> shown, or maybe that is not a problem yet...

Currently not a problem, and when it becomes a problem I think I prefer
to just cap the result set. Using other (http) search engines showed me
that everything not on page 1 is probably not relevant anyway and if I
would offer [1] people could refine the search to be more relevant.

> otherwise - keep up the good work!

Thanks for the comments, they're very useful!

k

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4. jan6 (a) tilde.ninja (jan6 (a) tilde.ninja)

May 21, 2020 4:26 PM, "kristof" <k at kvn.dev> wrote:
>> 4. Maybe there needs to be some pagination of the results if too many are
>> shown, or maybe that is not a problem yet...
> 
> Currently not a problem, and when it becomes a problem I think I prefer
> to just cap the result set. Using other (http) search engines showed me
> that everything not on page 1 is probably not relevant anyway and if I
> would offer [1] people could refine the search to be more relevant.

http search engines have quite a many results on a page, usually
also
it's usually first 3 pages that have relevant information, top 5 results 
are usually engineered and not relevent anyway, for www, also the extra 
results help to see how the query should be refined, such as "ice -cream" or whatnot

maybe make a "brief" and a "detailed" version, latter of which has longer 
descriptions and pagination (or simply a long page of the results?)

if you search for "blog" for example, you're bound to get more results 
than fit...and you might well want to see all of them...
related, maybe an option to reduce the hits on a single domain or 
directory? resulting in a hit, and at the end of the snippet or something, 
"and 7 other results from $domain" or such, obviously that is different 
enough that should be optional, if a feature at all

idk, maybe I'm overcomplicating and overthingking it all...

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5. Luke Emmet (luke.emmet (a) gmail.com)

On 21-May-2020 14:26, kristof wrote:
>> 2. Might be better UI to display snippets as bullets. That way clients that
>> prettily handle them will be able to show them nicely. I dont think it
>> matters to enumerate them 1 to 5.
> I'll have to read the gemini spec again :P

It would just be really simple like this

=> gemini://host1/path1 display text 1


=> gemini://host2/path2 display text 2


Best wishes

  - Luke

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