[IIAB] autocompletion search

[Braddock]

Hi Joel,
The Gutenberg search site looks great!

Does it work on smartphones?  (haven't tried it yet)

I think you can greatly enhance your autocomplete and search result 
rankings by using the pgterms:downloads counter in the catalog as a 
popularity measure.  By eyeball, it looks like a pretty reliable indicator.

Obviously the autocomplete needs to be done server-side.  I have 
server-side autocomplete jqueryUI/Flask/python code snippets below if 
they are helpful.  Basically you just return a JSON list.  See the 
jquery UI autocomplete demo for the javascript side - it isn't hard to 
set up.

thanks,
braddock


@blueprint.route('wikititles_autocomplete')
def wikititles_autocomplete_view():
     partial = request.args.get('term')
     p = wikititles_mongo.autocomplete(database(), partial)
     j = json_dumps(list(p))
     return Response(j, mimetype='application/json')

[...snip...]

def autocomplete(db, prefix):
     upperPrefix = prefix.upper()
     regex = get_prefix_regex(upperPrefix)
     matching = db.wikititles.find(
         {'name_in_upper_case': regex}
     ).sort(
         [('reverse_links', -1)]
     )
     return (title['name'] for title in matching)



On 03/09/2013 03:25 PM, Joel Steres wrote:
> Based on suggestions at HAK I added prototype of a search autocomplete
> feature.  To offload the server I pass all the possible matches to the
> client at once rather than interactively getting autocomplete
> suggestions from the server on each keypress.  The result is it is too
> big/slow and only matches single strings.  Still, would someone please
> test it and tell me if it is worth pursuing. (Note may require
> patience.  When I loaded it from zhen across several network hops it
> took 11 seconds before it was loaded.  Not sure why especially when
> the response code was 304, not modified.)
>
> Autocomplete is only attached to the search box at
> http://127.0.0.1:25000/iiab/books/