[Python-ideas] Browser for mailing lists

[Andrew Barnert]

From: Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu>

Sent: Saturday, March 29, 2014 3:08 PM


> On 3/29/2014 4:54 PM, Ben Finney wrote:
>>  Richard Prosser <richard.prosser at mail.com> writes:
>> 
>>>  I wanted to search this list (and other Python ones) but it is 
> practically
>>>  impossible to do so.
>> 
>>  The forum <URL:https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas>
>>  has all its messages archived online for web browsing at
>>  <URL:http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/>.
>> 
>>  So you can use any web search tool to search it. A good search engine
>>  like DuckDuckGo will let you constrain the search to a particular subset
>>  of the web:
>> 
>>       site:http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas foo bar baz
>> 
>>>  So why not add a tool like http://markmail.org/search/?q=python to
>>>  https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas or the like?
>> 
>>  We have generally-appicable services that index the web and make much
>>  better search tools. I don't often find a site's own custom search 
> tool
>>  to be sufficiently better to use it, when DuckDuckGo is available.
> 
> This list and many others are also available through, archived at, and 
> searchable at news.gmane.org.


How hard would it be to add appropriate links (or, better, custom search boxes, or, worse but still helpful, a paragraph explaining how to search each of those manually) to the mailing list archive pages?

For example, if you link to this:

http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en&fg=1&as_sitesearch=http%3A%2F%2Fmail.python.org%2Fpipermail%2Fpython-ideas


… then people just need to fill in their search terms on the Advanced Search page that comes up.