Feature Proposal: Make topic summary optionally based on search terms

Or: how to better scan search results for relevancy.

Motivation

When doing a search if is often hard to decide if a found topic is relevant. Deciding would be easier if the topic summary showed the searched terms in context (sentence fragments). This is how Google presents search results.

Specification

• Add a searchcontext parameter to $summary: $summary(searchcontext)

Implementation

When searchcontext is used:

• raw summarized text is used (after calling Render::makeTopicSummary)
• the topic text is scanned for the search terms
  • for each occurrence (following Google convention) 18 words around the text are used. If less than 9 word before the search term are available, the remainder amount of words after the term are used (so when after 6 words the search term is encountered, this will be displayed: 6 words before, term, 12 words after)
• after each "line" triple dots are displayed
• a maximum number of n characters will be used, so searching will stop when n characters are stored
• the resulting text will be parsed for occurrences of the search terms: these will be bolded

-- Contributors: ArthurClemens

Discussion

Good point.

On syntax, the existing tokens can be combined, for example $summary(100, showvarnames, noheader). Expanding on that seems logical, such as $summary(searchcontext), $summary(100, searchcontext), etc.

-- PeterThoeny - 13 Mar 2007

Noone has disagreed here. The originator never reacted to Peters proposed spec.

Who will drive the implementation?

-- KennethLavrsen - 08 Apr 2007

$summary(searchcontext) seems logical to me. I am not sure if I can do it by myself.

-- ArthurClemens - 08 Apr 2007

I amended the spec accordingly. Seems like a go, but we need a driver.

-- PeterThoeny - 09 Apr 2007

Signing up for driver.

-- ArthurClemens - 23 Apr 2007

Excellent, thanks Arthur!

-- PeterThoeny - 24 Apr 2007

I've written the #Implementation text.

-- ArthurClemens - 02 May 2007

Sounds like a very good spec to me.

-- KennethLavrsen - 05 May 2007

Accepted by 14-day rule

-- KennethLavrsen - 07 May 2007

Great!

Question: Is it aware of the number of chars in the summary, e.g. $summary(200, searchcontext)?

-- PeterThoeny - 08 May 2007

I'm very keen to use this. Is it available yet? What do I need to do?

-- TamsinTweddell - 01 Jun 2007

There's been no work on it yet, AFAIK. However a client of mine has come up with a similar request, so I may do some work on it.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 02 Jun 2007

Did not make it before feature freeze. So this should not be checked in before after 4.2.0 is released.

-- KennethLavrsen - 03 Jun 2007

Supported with a monkey patch in SearchSummaryPlugin. Code should be reusable for the core when 4.2 is out.

CC

Thanks Crawford. When we take this into the core I think it is better to add a $summary(searchcontext) switch instead of a SEARCHSUMMARYPLUGIN_CONTEXT preferences variable. The summary already groks $summary(50, showvarnames, noheader).

-- PeterThoeny - 06 Jun 2007

Good point, Peter. I was obviously focused on my clients requirements, so didn't need to support this.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 08 Jun 2007

I look forward to this being supported and would venture that this should be the default.

-- MartinCleaver - 17 Nov 2008

Yes, the plugin is definitely an improvement, so I can recommend to use the code.

-- ArthurClemens - 17 Nov 2008 - 16:57

makeTopicSummary (renamed to summariseText) is now in Meta.pm. Simple solution: use the code from SearchSummaryPlugin and call that when searchcontext is used. Better is to integrate this into makeTopicSummary and do the extra things in that sub.

Implementation task Tasks.Item8627.

-- ArthurClemens - 26 Feb 2010

Implemented. In the end I have rewritten the SearchSummaryPlugin code completely.

-- ArthurClemens - 28 Feb 2010