Tidbits @ Kassemi

Hey everyone. I'm back... I've just been too busy, and have thus ignored this blog. But, I have a good present for you today, a very simple relevance-based full-text search engine for your python based programs... If you've looked into tsearch2, but are on a hosting provider that might not let you install it, you've had to go looking around (or program one, if you're like me). The stemmer module is not something I wrote. All credits are located in the stemmer module's source.

Here's the source for this one:

search.tar.gz

Update: For best results, modify the frequency ranking to rank less over time for many multiple mentions of a term... The way I'm using is a simple 1/x^2 scale. This will prevent some issues with abuse my repetition of a term again and again, but you might want to try hitting up sort of limiting logarithmic function or something along those lines to be just a bit more careful.

Let's say you have a forum that you'd like to search with a post table similar to the following:

id | content # Name: forum_posts

That oversimplifies it, but anyway...



So you've populated with the posts that you've already got. Now when you want to add another post:



And when you want to search the database for a post:



Which will return a list ordered by relevance desc of the post ids that match
the search... There are no boolean-type searches, etc... Everything is done via a simple (incomplete but functional) relevance function... You can edit it if you'd like. It works now, but I plan to tweak it in the future.

Anyway, have fun!

James

Hello everyone,

My first big site ever, http://www.matchstd.com, has made CNN headline news this morning... It's great to see that happen... I only wish that I had been informed. Late into last night I was programming when I had an urge to eat. So I went to the kitchen, opened the frigde, pulled out a block of swiss, a tortilla and a hard-boiled egg... I cut the swiss into tiny blocks, placed it in the middle of the tortilla, peeled the shell off of the egg, and crumpled it's contents on top of the cheese... Opened the microwave, shoved it in, set it for a minute, and turned the TV on to HLN... I usually watch that and then a few hours of C-SPAN before going to bed...

The microwave beeped and I went to get my food, as I heard over the speakers: "... new service allows people with certain medical attentions to find each other, free, and anonymous..." I rushed over to the TV, hit the rewind button on the Tivo, and sure has hell we'd made the news!

So I ran into my roommate's room, and yelled at her to get up. We watched the segment, took a look at our membership numbers, and found that we'd gotten about 40 members since we had checked earlier in the morning! We're experiencing a heavy load at the moment... At JUST the wrong time, too. You heard me ramble on about the new Zippo for mod_python... Well, that's not ready yet. I was hoping to get a new site rolled out by Wed that would handle that kind of load, but now I'm really rushing it...

Anyway, good news.... Just not great timing. mpZippo will be running a version of the site by Wednsday, hopefully. It seems to be a lot faster with certain tasks (like displaying raw data), and a little slower with others (continuations, etc)... But it's a hell of a lot more stable all the way around, and we won't be giving users any nasty little service drops...

Take it easy everyone,
James

Hahahahaha!

I still can't stop laughing. This has got to be the funniest thing I've seen in a while now... It's probably because I'm real tired, but before it disappears into the dark abyss of internet history, here's slashdot today:



Happy April fool's day everyone!

James

Oh heck, almost forgot... My room-mate/business partner just completed a few intervies today for the matchstd.com site, and we made the news! We were on channel 7 and channel 4 news here in Albuququerque. As soon as I get some video I'll be sure to post it.