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  • CiviCRM Community Forums (archive) »
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  • Interactive Search Project: GSoC 2015
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Author Topic: Interactive Search Project: GSoC 2015  (Read 695 times)

prabh-me

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Interactive Search Project: GSoC 2015
February 10, 2015, 05:52:29 am
Hi

I am a student developer from India, with an avid interest in Search and Information Retrieval. I am interested in working for the Interactive Search Project for GSoC 2015.
Few things I wanted to discuss with the community:

1) Out of the four directions mentioned in the project description, I think that integrating CiviCRM's data with a search service would be the right choice with regards to scalability, effectiveness and speed. What do you guys think about it?

2) Various search services exist and choosing the correct service is a pre-requisite for the project's success.  The maturity that Solr comes with is not comparable with anything else. Even CloudSearch have now shifted their core engine from A9 to Solr. Sphinx and ElasticSearch are also packed with useful features.
With respect to CiviCRM's data, requirements and functionalities to be implemented, which search service would be the best?

Prabhjot Singh

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Re: Interactive Search Project: GSoC 2015
February 10, 2015, 11:49:08 am
Hello, Prabhjot. Great to hear about your interest.

I think you're right that a search service -- Solr, Sphinx, ElasticSearch -- would be good for scalability and speed (and also features). The downside is deployment; hosting and configuring a search service would be a big obstacle for many non-profit organizations. (The appeal of MySQL FTS as backend is that everyone running Civi already has MySQL.)

One possible game-plan would be to develop the summer project with Solr/Sphinx/ElasticSearch as a proof-of-concept. A POC could develop a new UI, explore some technical challenges, and ultimately the value+power+feasibility of a better search -- but it might not "reach the masses." A POC could be used at some organizations (i.e. the bigger / more technically-sophisticated folks). Other contributors could then build on it (e.g. perhaps someone could reuse the UI and add a MySQL backend; or perhaps someone could provide a prepackaged Solr service).

prabh-me

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Re: Interactive Search Project: GSoC 2015
February 11, 2015, 01:43:49 am
Great!
I'll try to prototype both the alternatives, and share my experiences asap.

 

xavier

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Re: Interactive Search Project: GSoC 2015
February 12, 2015, 08:30:24 am
Hi prabh,

I'd recommend you to use https://github.com/tttp/civicrm-buildkit to set up your dev environement, that's way faster than doing it by hand.

As for the search engine, it might be worthwhile to present the search interface as an api (it's already the case for the quick search used eg. on the top left corner) and use it for your queries.

Once abstracted via the api, it will probably be easier to to implement the api either using mysql fts or solr (or whatever other search engine)

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JohnFF

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Re: Interactive Search Project: GSoC 2015
February 18, 2015, 03:12:52 am
Hi prabh-me,

In Future First's dashboard, we use a "faceted search" function. This means that as you select options, other options are restricted based on the available data. There's generally a counter of the overall number of records that will be retrieved based on the options that have been selected. I will happily show you it if you like (PM me for details).

A great example of a lovely faceted search is here: https://eikes.github.io/facetedsearch/ I had it working as an extension at one point. I can probably pass on the code if you're interested, but there's not a huge amount there.

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prabh-me

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Re: Interactive Search Project: GSoC 2015
February 18, 2015, 04:41:09 am
Thank you community for all the suggestions.

I am trying to address the drawbacks of the current search mechanism and looking for a viable solution.
JohnFF, great example of faceted search. Can i explore the code?
PM'ed you
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