Webhamer Weblog: Search & ICT-related blogging

The new Windows Live suite includes three different services for file storage and online synchronization. They are called Live Mesh, Windows Live Sync and Windows Live SkyDrive – all apps are available for free and you just need a Windows Live account to get started.

Are you eager to try out the latest Firefox 3 beta but not ready to give up on your Firefox 2 yet? Normally when a new version of Firefox gets installed, it’ll replace the current version in the machine and it practically makes reverting a tedious task. Here’s how you can get a taste of the latest Firefox 3 beta and still keep your Firefox 2 together with its profile settings and bookmarks working perfectly fine; in short, keeping 2 versions of Firefox in Mac.

When you install the security support for the first time, you have to define the mapping of Windows accounts to Linux logins for every user who owns files which should be visible from both Windows and Linux. usermap is a basic utility to help you in doing that, it is available for both systems with a few differences.

Solr is open source enterprise search platform build on top of the famous Apache Lucene project. Nutch is open source web-search software used mostly as a web crawler. I needed to check out the Solr search engine, and integrate it with Nutch web crawler. So i followed the tutorial on http://www.lucidimagination.com/blog/2009/03/09/nutch-solr/ which differs a bit with the versions (the tutorial was written with Solr 1.3.0). The versions i used:
Ubuntu 9.04
Solr 1.4.0
Nutch 1.0

There are two parts to a search engine's user experience: the user interface (design of the search forms and results pages) and the functionality (how well it matches and sorts pages). When you install a search engine, you should consider both aspects, design the interface carefully and test all aspects of the usability.

The abundance and variation of search implementations is presenting a new challenge: how to leverage user behaviors to ensure they discover the content they’re seeking. To better understand these challenges, Jared Spool has enlisted industry experts Mark Burrell and Peter Morville to participate in this month’s online seminar provided by User Interface Engineering.

FunctionQuery allows one to use the actual value of a field and functions of those fields in a relevancy score. I have documents that have an integer field "popularity".

I want to rank results by a combination of normal fulltext search relevance and popularity.

It's kinda like search in digg - result ranking is based on the search relevance as well as how many digs a posting has.