Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

DG, MR, etc...

Author:Thomas A. Creedon
Posted:6/14/1999; 12:29:38 PM
Topic:What is DG?
Msg #:7355 (In response to 7350)
Prev/Next:7354 / 7356

Hello all,

I just had a thought triggered by Donald's query. It's become common practice to refer to the discussion group as DG and mainResponder as MR.

The downside to this is that the search engine (SE! :-) ) will miss these "words". These words are very important in our context.

There are a couple of ways to handle this that I can think of...

1) Alter our convention. Perhaps we can always refer to the first instance of DG, MR, etc... in our messages fully spelled out. Both in the subject and the body?

2) Some kind of extension to the SE? A way for certain words to always be indexed no matter what? Perhaps the feature is already there and I missed it?

Another and perhaps better solution would be a translation table of some kind. For example, if I type in "dg" to the search engine, on the fly it could be translated to "discussion group" and even "discussionGroup". Each server operator would have to maintain their own translation table.

If this isn't an area Userland wants to dig right now, perhaps giving us a callback method to alter the SE words before the search is done? Placement of the callback could be a tad tricky. If it's placed after the word cleaning routines, then we might lose some words. In this case, DG and MR.

This could have some powerful applications. In my own circumstance, commonly misspelled words could be handled.

Any thoughts? 

Toodle-looooooooo........
Thomas


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