[Zest-devel] Re: [Mailman-Developers] Pipermail replacement? Zest!

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Tue, Feb 26, 2002 at 09:59:39AM -0800, Chuq Von Rospach wrote:
> On 2/26/02 9:17 AM, "Jay R. Ashworth" <jra@baylink.com> wrote:
> > Searching doesn't belong inside of a list archiver that has a web
> > interface -- why do the same work twice?  There are half a dozen or
> > more web search engine packages which can be pointed at that interface,
> > right?
> 
> This is a discussion we had early on at apple. You'll notice if you look
> closely that apple's list archives are not available through apple's
> corporate search engine, and lists has its own search engine.
> 
> Why? Because of focus. People going to www.apple.com don't want to be
> sidetracked having to wade through hits in the archives looking for what
> they want on the main site. Loading in the archives really hurts being able
> to find stuff in BOTH data sets. My opinion is that archives should not be
> generically lumped in with the rest of the web site in a single browser,
> because our tests and studies have shown it reduces the efficiency in
> finding stuff in both. They're really disjoint data sets.
> 
> So my feeling is a list server archive ought to be an independent search
> engine, and our tests back that up. If someone goes to www.apple.com and
> wants to find the latest java updater for MacOS X, they don't really want
> 100 postings from Java-dev to pop up and annoy them.

No argument there, though *my* personal preferred approach is to have
the same search engine do all the work, and have a set of checkboxes
for domain selection, with a properly chosen default...

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra@baylink.com
Member of the Technical Staff     Baylink                             RFC 2100
The Suncoast Freenet         The Things I Think
Tampa Bay, Florida        http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

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