Some fancy pants screwed help.ubuntu.com search again.

[Tom Davies]

________________________________
From: Jeremy Bicha <jeremy at bicha.net>
Cc: ubuntu-doc at lists.ubuntu.com
Sent: Mon, 15 August, 2011 9:49:36
Subject: Re: Some fancy pants screwed help.ubuntu.com search again.

On 15 August 2011 04:23, Marko Oreskovic <markoresko at gmail.com> wrote:
> If you name any other search product that is alternative and could be
> used in-house, then say so or be less ignorant to the topic.
>
>> By the way, there are many other ways of doing email that aren't owned
>> by "personal information-hungry companies". You should look into them
>> before being so critical of other people that happen to use Google
>> sometimes too.
>
> E-mail is not the topic of this topic/wuestion/RQE.
>
> Please re-read previous mail and try to figure out before answering to
> non-related things no one asked for, but explicitly stated they are not
> related..

Marko, please stop now.

I spent a fair amount of time today (that I should have been doing
more useful stuff) testing to see if any other search provider could
be plugged into our site. Bing quit their site search program and
replaced it with a complex API. As volunteers who aren't web
developers, that is not a workable option. I also tried DuckDuckGo
which has an embeddable search box but it doesn't work right with site
search. Google is by far the best option.

If you're a programmer, you're more than welcome to submit a working
alternative. Otherwise, I don't want to listen to your paranoid rants
saying that we should remove search from our site. The Ubuntu
documentation team is rather small and all-volunteer. Your emails are
preventing us from focusing on fixing real problems.

Jeremy



Hi :)
I definitely appreciate the work done by volunteers and any other people that 
have got documentation into such good shape.  It is a mamouth task and 
constantly evolving so there are always likely to be improvements worth 
considering.  


OpenSource projects tend to be quite modular allowing components to be swapped 
out and replaced with competing products.  A proposal to switch to a different 
component would need to show that the newer one is better and self-sustainable.  


I doubt any of the competition are any better at protecting people's privacy.  
MS have been pushing hard to try to get Bing into the market and all this fuss 
about Google started up with suspiciously good timing to help clear a way to let 
Bing in.  However it keeps proving itself much less good than Google although 
those problems get much less publicity.  

Regards from
Tom :)
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