CivicActions

After a couple months of development. The google appliance module is now published on drupal.org!

This module allows drupal developers and site administrators to plug into google's enterprise search offerings (the GoogleMini and the Google Search Appliance).

I've written a little how-to and announcement on my personal site entitled Google Appliance Integration with Drupal

It is currently in beta, so any lucky google appliance users out there, please bang on it!

Thanks,
J

Surf Canyon, one of my favorite search add-ons to improve Google search, auto-updated today - reminding me that I've been meaning to share this for the Way We Work.

Basically, Surf Canyon helps you find information deep within the search results. As you search in Google (or Yahoo or MSN), the results you click go on to train Surf Canyon to find links more relevant to what you are looking for.

In the case of the example image below, searching for the Media Mover module in Google, I am able to quickly find the Drupal Video Group as well, pulled in from page 3.

Surf Canyon works with Firefox (and Internet Explorer, if you must).

Here is an (incomplete) rundown of the various 'similar/related node' type modules:

It should be pointed out that while related links is one of the oldest of the bunch, and has most features, it is not quite as flexible as people are looking for (which I think is the main reason for the other modules), and the UI is not always easy to understand.

Here is what I would like to see - a module that (on node creation/edition and also regularly refreshed on cron) provides a hook to allow various modules to add in some numeric factors for how that node relates to other nodes. These modules could have their own configuration (e.g. to only pull from certain vocabularies), and the central API would allow you to weight one module/factor against another (e.g. taxonomy similarity v.s. word similarity v.s. destination node votes or freshness).

It would basically then just dump this information into a table and provide it to views as a sort option (that would need to load a node from an NID passed in an argument to provide a 'relevant' sort). This would allow you to display it per content type or whatever. For bonus points there would be a way for Content Recommendation Engine or other modules with user specific input to add their influence to the final list.

I came across this list of 20 tips for using deli.icio.us to drive traffic to your site, and while it is geared more towards commercial sites, I think there are some interesting ideas for organizations like the ones we work with.

Many of the ideas on the list are generally good ideas, not just for using del.icio.us.

This is Part two of a six part series on Drupal's search functionality.

This installment discusses how Drupal's search work from a SQL level and offer some solutions for improving performance.

Introduction

The Drupal search SQL is elegant and powerful. But it's time to update it. There are two issues that are no longer relevant that affect the current implementation and limit it's performance.

A number of CivicActioneers (my self included) have proposed sessions for the upcoming DrupalCon in Barcelona (September 19-22). Almost the entire team will be traveling to Spain a week early for our 3rd annual European Fall Retreat, so we'll have plenty of time to polish our sessions and get input from the team.

Here is a quick look at the sessions we've proposed:

Robert Douglas of Lullabot wrote a great tutorial on setting up Views Fast Search, a great module that speeds up search on your Drupal site (an oversimplification, but I'll let you read Robert's article for the details).

I'm surprisingly impressed with the new Ask.com. Look out Google!

What I like most is the contextual search (suggested topics to "expand" or "narrow" your search) plus integrated wikipedia entries, images and videos - all on a single page layout.

For example, search: Barcelona, Spain

http://www.ask.com/web?q=Barcelona%2C+Spain

Looks good to me!

I just stumbled upon (not with suble upon though) this Scary blog post about google data mining your voice:

Content drives the Internet, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) drives people to that content. Not sure where to start with SEO for your own site? Look no furthur than Copyblogger's latest roundup of great posts.