Re: nnweb + Gmane search (was: nnweb fix)

[Olly Betts <olly@survex.com>]

Andreas Seltenreich <andreas+ding@gate450.dyndns.org> writes:
> It seems to work quite well after adjusting URLs and regexps. The only
> drop of bitterness is that there are only 10 hits per page. So
> nnweb-max-hits' default value of 999 would mean ten requests for
> Google searches, but 100 for Gmane ones.

Please don't do that!

> If an option to customise the number of results per page could be
> added to the Xapian-powered search, it'd be as usable via nnweb as the
> google one.

It already exists, just pass a CGI parameter called HITSPERPAGE.  The value
is clipped to the range 10-1000.

> Of course, if there was an option to output the result set as S-exps
> or nov-lines it'd be even better .

I don't have enough information available to produce nov-lines unless some
fields aren't required (no message-id for example).  Other output formats
aren't hard to add, but require me to update two places if anything changes
so are a bit more work to support.  So I'd prefer something more generic than
S-exps.

> Btw, is there a way to inline group or author search in the main
> search string? With google you could search for, e.g.,
> 
>    "group:*nethack insubject:pudding-farming"
> 
> ...which works nicely with nnweb's single-search-string approach.

There's partial support for group: but it needs more work.  You need to
strip the "gmane." prefix from the groupname:

    group:emacs.gnus.general xapian

Only trailing wildcards are supported and must be after a ".":

    group:emacs.gnus.* xapian

Cheers,
    Olly