[Xapian-discuss] patent searches with xapian

[Olly Betts]

On Fri, Oct 27, 2006 at 06:17:59PM -0400, Kevin Webb wrote:
> Our initial test system is now online and allows searching of
> documents between 1836 and 1925 (about 1.5 million documents):

Is this intended to be a public test system?  I ask because it doesn't
seem to be linked from allpatents.org currently.

I can add it to our "current users" page if you like.  A "powered
by Xapian" reciprocal link is always appreciated (and helping more
people discover Xapian helps us improve it faster so it benefits you as
well!)

> Feel free to explore and make comments - if you have any thoughts on
> how we might improve the interface or the search indexing I'd be glad
> to chat! I may also write up a summary on how we've managed the text
> over image markup implementation with Xapian (it's nothing
> particularly fancy but may be of use to others none the less!)...

I think that would be interesting.  I suspect most people can guess how
it might be done, but there's nothing quite like the wisdom from actual
implementation experience.

Does this highlighting rely on cookies to work?  It doesn't work for me
using Firefox 2.  I declined your cookie and suspect that's why since the
search terms don't seem to be passed to the results page by any other
mechanism I can see.

It might be nicer not to use a cookie here, since as it is I can't email
someone a URL for a particular patent including the highlighting.

Cheers,
    Olly