Monday, June 14, 2010

Feature of the week: The new System Tag sys:title:tag allows for partial Search

Today we introduce a small new feature which will hopefully be useful for you as our user. In one of the last releases we introduced the new system tag sys:title:tag.

As one can guess from the name of the system tag, it can be used to search for a word (only one word) in the title field of publications. An example search for the word "Restful" is http://www.bibsonomy.org/tag/sys:title:Restful. Searching for two words is possible as well by using the system tag twice. As you can see from the URL the search is made over the entire database. The system tag can be used in the user environment, too. Again we look for "Restful" but in this case for the user hotho: http://www.bibsonomy.org/user/hotho/sys:title:Restful. This two search request are not really novel but for the system tag we added the possibility to use the wildcard *. By adding * at the end of a word or even of a part of a word a search for the beginning is made. An example could be the search "Rest*" in the collection of the user hotho http://www.bibsonomy.org/user/hotho/sys:title:Rest* and it works for the entire database as well.

For interested users: To make this feature available we setup a special index in the search part of our system. Lucene is the basis of our search engine framework which is very fast for search engine like queries and allows for partially search requests, too. With the help of the system tag we redirect the request to the corresponding index. We use the system tag internally for other features like the auto completion but this will be the topic of one of the next features of the
week. In the near future we will be able to offer more system tags as we are currently working on a new framework for such tags.