[Xapian-discuss] Re: Xapian vs Lucene

[James Aylett]

On Sat, Feb 03, 2007 at 10:29:03AM +0000, Jason White wrote:

> >It should still be balanced with a quote I had the other day:
> >"I looked at the Xapian website, and it looked like it was a page
> >written by a 14 years old boy, whereas the Lucene website looks very
> >professional".
> 
> I *strongly* disagree.
> 
> The Xapian Web site was clearly written by an expert. It is well organized,
> and informative.

I think the distinction needs to be drawn between content and
presentation (which includes things like executive
summaries). Xapian's website is very much for developers as it stands,
and also doesn't benefit from being hosted on the Apache Forrest
system, which gives it a whole load of CMS features straight away. (On
the other hand, I as a developer personally find the Apache sites
quite awkward, because it can be difficult to find the documentation
and download links.)

This is something we're aware of, however. We discussed back in the
summer the idea of having a more problem-and-solution orientated front
page, with an introductory section that didn't pre-suppose so much
information up front (the first paragraph requires a fair amount of
thinking if you don't know what IR is, and cites the GPL without
explanation or a link, both of which could be improved upon).

The main problem is for someone to have the time to do something about
it. Getting web presence right such that it can be sold into a CIO/CKO
based solely on that is a very tricky problem, especially without the
money for stock photography.

> >Another quote I had was:
> >"From what I have read, Xapian people seem to consider their way of
> >treating the indexing process/algorithms as the biblical truth, that
> >doesn't have to be discussed, while Lucen explains a lot more what they
> >are doing and why".
> 
> Have you actually read the discussion of algorithms and the introduction to
> information retrieval on the Xapian Web site?

Yeah, I don't entirely get that either. I spent ages at one point
trying to find out how the Lucene ranking algorithm works (which is
there, somewhere), and why it was chosen/developed in that way (which
I couldn't find). Xapian has, I think, all of that information
available. (Although again, it isn't presented as obviously as I'd
like; however going into the Docs page is a good bet, and there's a
paragraph pointing you in exactly the right direction.)

> These quotes are both uninformed regarding Xapian, so I suggest that they
> shouldn't be taken seriously.

As has been pointed out, the fact that someone *does* think in this
way needs to be taken seriously. I don't, however, think they point to
a content problem with the website.

J

-- 
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  James Aylett                                                  xapian.org
  james at tartarus.org                               uncertaintydivision.org