Search result summary

[maximilian]

Hi all,

There's an issue about which I couldn't find anything in the documentation or the forum : on the search results page, is it possible to include a small summary or extract of the document along with each result (and highlight the search keywords in that text) ?

Is it possible natively or by modifying a configuration file, or does the search component have to be tweaked ?
Do the Alfresco developers plan to add that feature later ?
(And is Lucene even able to do that ?)

Any help appreciated

Thanks

[sam69]

Hi,

I am also very interrested on this feature. I know it's possible with Lucene, because I already saw several web application based on Lucene with a search summary and highlited keyword.

eg : http://www.zilverline.org/zilverlineweb/space/screenshot

I hope this feature will appears soon 😉

Sam

[sam69]

I found an interesting toolbox for lucene :

http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/lucene-sandbox/
Term Highlighter
    A small set of classes for highlighting matching terms in search results.
    The repository for the Highlighter contribution :
http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/lucene/java/trunk/contrib/highlighter/

[maximilian]

Thanks for the information Sam.

Does anyone know a way to get in touch with the Alfresco team to check if that feature is on their roadmap ?

They don't seem to show up on this forum that often…

[andy]

Hi

This feature is on the list, but not at the top.
We are aware of the lucene support for highlighting.

There are a couple of issues:

1) To do the highlighting we would have to convert the document/attributes to text a second time. This transform may take some time.

2) Last time I looked, highlighting supported basic queries. I have not tried repeated highlighting for each field within a complex query. This is possible as far as I know. But to do this we would have to track and manage all the bits of the query - which is actully quite likely but we do not do that now……or walk the rewritten query.

3) We search over quite a few attributes so we would have to indicate which attribute(s) led to the match, as well as highlighting within the term. It is not just content highlighting.

4) The text conversion has no formatting. You will not get Word documents highlighted nicely as Word fragments etc…

5) The UI for the above is a challenge.

The most likely thing to be supported in the next 6 months is the highlighting of content on demand from the search results. This would be as plain text.

Regards

Andy

[paulhh]

Thanks Andy

It's nice to see you back in action after the ski accident.

Cheers
Paul.

[maximilian]

Thanks 

[lnagra]

http://www.alfresco.com/jira/browse/AR-568

Andy,

Thanks for the insight into the isssues around implementing search term highlighting and content summarisation. Effective, fast and comprehensive search is a key buy-in factor for our intended web application. Basing on Alfresco has delivered a search that has wow'ed users in demos. But the one request we continually recieve is for a "snippet of context highlighting the search terms".

We've discussed this with Dave C during a recent training session and have raised a JIRA so that it can be considered as a feature request. We will continue to look into this issue as we develop our application and will post anything we find against that issue.

Kind Regards and thanks for the excellent work,

Lakhdip