[wp-hackers] Page searching examples [was: 2.4 planning discussion]

[Doug Stewart]

On 10/3/07, Travis Snoozy <ai2097 at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:

> Because a user knows -what- he's looking for, and it's search's job to
> tell him -where-, not the other way around? ;)
>

This isn't the user's call, it's the theme devs' call.  Placing a
page_search_results() and a post_search_results() template tag in a
search results page would return (theoretically) the results of
searching on a string in both the posts and pages.

> Also, this would prime templates to get hosed if/when any unified
> relevance-based search came into play.
>
> > I'd be down with the more granular approach -- theme devs could then
> > have index.php?s=blahblahblah return results similar to what Apple's
> > Spotlight does, breaking the results down by relative content type
> > (or, in our case, it'd be relative context type).
>
> Content type (video, messages, pictures, etc.) is somewhat important;
> you generally know if you're looking for a picture or a report. The
> splitting of each WordPress content type is more akin to searching Word
> documents vs. RTF vs. plain text vs. PDF vs. HTML. It might be useful
> in a subset of cases for the user to be specific about which type he
> wants to search (like, when you -know- the file you're looking for is a
> PDF), but the general case of "find me some documents that might be
> relevant" should search -all- of those sources without you having to
> individually specify each one.
>

That's why I clarified with "context type" instead of content.  I
meant content in the "blog vs. pages" sense, not the ".txt vs. .rtf
vs. .mp3" sense.

-- 
-Doug

http://literalbarrage.org/blog/