Searching the Documentation

[Phil Bull]

Hi Matt,

On Thu, 2007-06-14 at 22:02 +0100, Matthew East wrote:
[...]
> That's basically a pretty good idea, I think. I'm slightly wary of a
> tool that searches resources outside the actual site that the user is
> searching from, because I think that it will increase the confusion that
> we already see about users not knowing which part of the Ubuntu
> ecosystem they are in. I think there are lots of small improvements we
> can make to the individual areas - for example, the wiki search could be
> improved so that (a) the Title search is removed by default; (b) the
> search results formatting is improved, etc. I don't think that would be
> a lot of work for the right person. For the system docs, we can improve
> the search results by introducing keywords to the various sections of
> our documentation (in the actual code, they don't appear to the
> reader).

When you visit help.ubuntu.com, the home page is the index page of the
system docs for the current release of Ubuntu. Instead of this, I was
thinking that we could have something similar to the Google homepage,
with a big search box in the middle (which searches all of the official
and community docs) and some links to various sources of documentation.
I'll try to make a mockup of this to demonstrate the idea.

Is Yelp currently able to search keywords? If so, what format do
keywords take and when can I start adding them?!

> However, outside of those improvements, there are clear advantages to
> having a unified search system which you have set out really well and I
> think it is definitely worth trying to work through the various issues.
> I know that the two Matts, newz2000 and mpt are interested in developing
> search.ubuntu.com, so they might help draw up a battleplan, as it were.

It might be worth creating a spec. I'm confident that this could be
implemented in time for Gutsy.

Thanks,

Phil

-- 
Phil Bull
http://www.launchpad.net/people/philbull