Re: Indexed search with grep-like output

[Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 4:51 PM, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
>> From: Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com>
>> Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2011 15:15:39 +0100
>> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
>>
>> On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 2:53 PM, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
>> >> From: Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com>
>> >> Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2011 14:46:45 +0100
>> >> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
>> >>
>> >> > Yes, I use one of the tools that builds on Lucene (see
>> >> > http://www.methods.co.nz/docindexer/) to index MS Office documents
>> >> > (some 17,000 of them) I have on my office machine.  It is also very
>> >> > fast: just a few seconds to return a query.
>> >>
>> >> Is that from within Emacs or?
>> >
>> > It doesn't matter.  Most of the time is to output a long list of
>> > documents, i.e. I/O.
>>
>> Does that mean you actually see the same time inside of Emacs as
>> outside of Emacs?
>
> Yes, the same (2.5 seconds for a query that returns 951 documents).


I think my estimation of the time required were a bit too high (though
it depends on whether it is "cold" or warm test).

I have now added support for Google Desktop Search too (the grepping
is not added there yet though). It feels snappier, but the timing
tells me it should be about the same as Windows Desktop Search. Wonder
if I did something wrong... ;-)

The Google version is a bit more cumbersome to setup, but on the other
hand you do not need to add ruby for it. And it is cross platform.

Both the Google and the Windows version seems fast enough at least for
the data set I have. On my old pc it takes no more than 1-2 seconds in
most cases to do the search.

It would be nice to have support for other search engines too, but I
am not going to add that myself. However if they are SQL-based then it
should be a simple matter of restructuring the ruby file a little bit,
generalizing the code a bit more, to add them.


Note that my part of the coding is not quite ready yet (some parts are
missing and there are some bugs), but the structure is there so it
should be ok to add new search engines to what there is now.