Searching Ubuntu website

[Matthew Nuzum]

[trimming but trying to leave essence in tact since this msg is a couple
weeks old]

On Tue, 2007-01-30 at 20:41 +0000, David M wrote:
> So, I thought, I'll just head over to ubuntu.com and search for 'Flash'.
> No relevant results, no joy. :-(
> 
> Many newbies would even give up at that point, I fear.

> Finally, we get to 'Wiki'.

> *Finally*, if I search within the wiki [...] only then
> do I get what I'm looking for when I search for 'Flash'.

> So, in short, methinks the search box that you first encounter at
> ubuntu.com needs a bit of a "Do What I Mean" upgrade, in order to be 
> more user-friendly ;-)
> 
> It should search the wiki and help.ubuntu.com by default, as well as,
> umm, well, whatever it does search..

Your points are all *excellent* and 100% on the mark.

I'm the Ubuntu.com webmaster and have spent what I feel is a good bit of
time thinking about this subject. We could do something like a Google
search box, but there are some political and practical problems with
that. Instead, what we've decided to do is implement our own search
engine using a well-known and very functional off-the-shelf (but open
source) web indexer. 

It will be indexing all of the primary Ubuntu websites so that whatever
you search for, the results will be grouped together. It will even allow
us to weight the results, so that, for example, results from official,
qa'd documentation show up above potentially less reliable search
results.

The intention was to roll this out in November, but we decided to wait
and deploy it with (or shortly after) the new Ubuntu.com website which
is due out this month.

I'm always eager to hear about people's website concerns (I don't mind
compliments either). You can e-mail me directly, or if your msg isn't
too spammy, you can send it to webmaster at . However, an excellent way to
provide feedback is through launchpad at
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu-website so that a few others who like
website stuff can listen in and even help out a bit.

Please let me know about any website feedback you have.
-- 
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode