[Xapian-discuss] Simulating Fields

[Luis Zarrabeitia]

On Monday 04 May 2009 06:59:24 am Olly Betts wrote:
> On Mon, May 04, 2009 at 12:26:43AM -0400, Luis Alberto Zarrabeitia Gomez 
wrote:
> > Now, what would you recommend to match the document titled "sex and the
> > city", but not "sex and the city 2: the return"?
>
> I'm not sure I understand why the sequel isn't a relevant result (albeit
> one which you would want to rank lower than the exact match).  Since I
> don't really seem to understand the aim, I suspect I may be missing the
> point of what you're trying to do.

Yes, you are missing the point, but that's my fault for not explaining it :D. 
And amazingly, even if you are missing it, you are giving me helpful hints!

Anyway:

I'm indexing a set of documents, and storing them. The documents have title 
(and category, and so on). I can retrieve the individual documents by the 
docid, but then I'd need to know the docid beforehand. The titles, however, 
may be known in advance (i.e, a link pointing to them somewhere). Following 
your example, if I want to read the paper named "sex and the city", I need 
the system to retrieve _that_ paper, and hopefully suggest the articles "sex 
city" and "sex and the city 2: the return". I'm not _searching_ the 
collection, I'm "browsing" through it. (Of course, I need to search the 
collection, otherwise I wouldn't be using xapian instead of a relational 
database). Think of the buttons "search" and "go" in most wikis. "Go" should 
do a search through the titles only if an exact match is not found. And a 
link within the wiki itself should never do a search - if there is no 
document by that name, it should give a 404.

-- 
Luis Zarrabeitia (aka Kyrie)
Fac. de Matemática y Computación, UH.
http://profesores.matcom.uh.cu/~kyrie