Re: Instant Search on N900
 

i would at least like to search my emails. =)

Re: Instant Search on N900
 

Brainstorm anyone? What kind of contents need to be searched, e.g. files, file metadata, emails, SMS, IM etc... How to implement indexing, and what kind of search interface to provide? Should the search results be filtered by type of the content, size, date range etc. How to open the specific search results, is it possible to jump to certain SMS or email?

Re: Instant Search on N900
 

Why not first look at how search is implemented on iPhone, Symbian, Android, WebOS etc and then take it from there?

Re: Instant Search on N900
 

Totally agree - Apple has it with iPhone and it's quite frankly possibly the *best* iPhone feature. How can Apple have found a way for instant search without killing the battery and the collective might of the open source community haven't?

It's not rocket science - the initial index is OK to max out the CPU. Thereafter, monitor the filesystem with inotify (or whatever the Maemo equivalent is) such that any writes will be spotted and indexed regardless of where. Contacts, SMS, Calendar, etc don't need to be actively indexed since their databases can be queried directly.

The only overhead in normal use will be when other apps are writing, and even then it can be minimised.

There is really no reason why instant search should be such a big power drain. The real problem is that everybody is accustomed to desktop applications where CPU time is essentially unlimited, and power limits simply don't exist. When it comes to mobile platforms, too many people assume the limitations mean it can't be done. The N900 is more powerful and with a better battery (in my experience as an ex-iPhone owner) than the iPhone yet Apple managed it, so why can't we?

Re: Instant Search on N900
 

It's also possible that all data pushed to device using iTunes is indexed by the the iTunes itself.

I guess for N900 the existing tracker is a good tool, but there's no point running two similar processes for global search and media indexing that already exists. Tracker has quite nice support for indexing file contents of different types of files. I have no idea how to add support for e.g. emails. Another issue is the somewhat outdated version of current tracker.

Re: Instant Search on N900
 

I agree it's possible the initial index may be performed by iTunes, the iPhone absolutely does search across new content. Of course, Calendars, Contacts, Notes, SMS, etc are all in sqlite databases on iPhone so yeah - there's very little "indexing" as such, but then that just makes it all the more egregious that the N900 has nothing by default for the same things.

Like I say above, extending this to the entire filesystem via inotify really shouldn't be such a big problem, although I don't agree that indexing should not occur while on battery - it's a mobile device that spends over 75% of it's time on battery. You need to be able to index those items you receive (when you receive them) while on battery too.

Re: Instant Search on N900
 

What is lost if SPARQL is not used? Is the search from index missing the information provided by ontologies, or is this already lost when indexing.

One good question is that what kind of indexing is used in Meego? Moblin uses Bickley for indexing and providing search API.

Re: Instant Search on N900
 

True, but you've implicitly assumed a much more complicated application. Rather than run a periodic sweep that simply scans files for strings, you have to first see that something has been changed (for all applications, however they store their data), and then index these changes. Oh, and remove the old references.

Editing the a contact and fixing Fred's last name, as you had incorrectly typed Fluntstone when you meant Flintstone, means that you have to have a model of individual records inside the contacts database, and be able to track down and remove all the old references. The app may not edit in place after all, Fred's new record number could be 123599, with the old record at 12012 marked as simply marked as old. Otherwise the othe fields ("Note: wife's name Wilma") that weren't changed would turn up Fred's old record.

Re: Instant Search on N900
 

Finding that something's changed is pretty trivial - there's notification functionality built into the kernel (I think inotify is the current one, but it's been a while since I played with that).

As you say, that's more complex, but is what you really ought to be doing anyway - simple string-based searching is going to fail for an awful lot of file formats (due to compression, binary formats, etc), so the indexer will need to know how to read the appropriate data from different file formats (for example, you can see that tracker already knows how to deal with ID3 tags in music files).

Re: Instant Search on N900
 

well anyway, actual problem boils down to the root cause, why tracker has file contents functionality disabled. It worths creating a bug, so that to see if that is realistic feature to expect.