searching news groups

searching news groups

[Steinar Bang]

One thing I find myself doing a lot, is going to Deja News, setting a
search filter, limiting the search to one particular news group (and
maybe an author), and then searching for a particular keyword or
keywords (e.g. searching for problems with -l44bsd on
comp.mail.sendmail today).

And I found myself thinking how nice it would have been to do this
from within a Gnus news group.  The actual articles could be retrieved
from the news server, if they were still available, or the search
mechanism could attempt to "fake" the articles, from the HTML versions
on Deja News or Alta Vista or whereever.

I'm not sure how the user interface to this functionality should be,
but I guess it should be possible to implement similar functionality
for mail groups, using glimpse or some other indexing tool.

Just some idle thoughts on a Friday...

Have a nice weekend!


- Steinar

Re: searching news groups

[Kai Grossjohann]

>>>>> On 01 Aug 1997, Steinar Bang said:

  Steinar> One thing I find myself doing a lot, is going to Deja News,
  Steinar> setting a search filter, limiting the search to one
  Steinar> particular news group (and maybe an author), and then
  Steinar> searching for a particular keyword or keywords
  Steinar> (e.g. searching for problems with -l44bsd on
  Steinar> comp.mail.sendmail today).

Try "G w" from the Group buffer.

kai
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Re: searching news groups

[Steinar Bang]

>>>>> Kai Grossjohann <grossjohann@charly.cs.uni-dortmund.de>:

>>>>> On 01 Aug 1997, Steinar Bang said:
Steinar> One thing I find myself doing a lot, is going to Deja News,
Steinar> setting a search filter, limiting the search to one
Steinar> particular news group (and maybe an author), and then
Steinar> searching for a particular keyword or keywords
Steinar> (e.g. searching for problems with -l44bsd on
Steinar> comp.mail.sendmail today).

> Try "G w" from the Group buffer.

I should have mentioned that I know of nnweb, and while it probably
contains all the necessary "machinery" to do what I want, it doesn't
do so yet.

What I want (that it doesn't do), is to 
 1. constrain it to a newsgroup
 2. get real articles from the newsgroup if I can, fake them from
    search results, if they have expired on the server

I would also like to do this from a *Group* buffer, with other
articles from threads the matches appear in, interleaved.

But I'm not clear on how this should look, and work.  And it would
involving integrating two backend... hm...

Maybe create a temporary "search group" for a particular group...?


- Steinar

Re: searching news groups

[Chris D. Halverson]

Steinar Bang <sb@metis.no> writes:

> What I want (that it doesn't do), is to 
>  1. constrain it to a newsgroup

Actually, it does. You just need to know the DejaNews query
language. For example:

(~g gnu.emacs.gnus) & (~s search)

Will search gnu.emacs.gnus for the string "search". Check out:

http://web3.dejanews.com/help/help_ps.shtml

For more info on their language.

>  2. get real articles from the newsgroup if I can, fake them from
>     search results, if they have expired on the server

Can't help you on this one.

Chris

-- 
Chris D. Halverson                         Complete Internet Solutions
PGP mail accepted, finger for public key   http://www.CompleteIS.com/~cdh/

Re: searching news groups

[John McClary Prevost]

>>>>> "kg" == Kai Grossjohann <grossjohann@ls6.cs.uni-dortmund.de> writes:
>>>>> On 04 Aug 1997, John McClary Prevost said:

    kg> There is nnkiboze, which is something like nnfilter plus
    kg> nnvirtual, I guess.

Hmm.  Sort of.  But don't you need to do something explicit (more than
just "g") to get it to scan things?  I'll go try it and report back
whether or not it's satisfactory...

John.

Re: searching news groups

[Kai Grossjohann]

>>>>> On 05 Aug 1997, John McClary Prevost said:

  John> Hmm.  Sort of.  But don't you need to do something explicit
  John> (more than just "g") to get it to scan things?

M-x nnkiboze-generate-groups RET I think.
kai
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Re: searching news groups

[John McClary Prevost]

>>>>> "kg" == Kai Grossjohann <grossjohann@ls6.cs.uni-dortmund.de> writes:
>>>>> On 05 Aug 1997, John McClary Prevost said:

    John> Hmm.  Sort of.  But don't you need to do something explicit
    John> (more than just "g") to get it to scan things?

    kg> M-x nnkiboze-generate-groups RET I think. 

Yeah, that's the one.

I've also determined that it's unnacceptable.  First: it seems fixated
on NNTP--I can't get it to scan my nnml groups.  Or rather, I can, but
it won't fetch articles.  It also doesn't seem to make any effort to
be fast--it took me a good 5 minutes simply to scan my email!  There
must be a better way than this.

First, we might be able to optimize somehow by noting changes in the
active info for groups--only update info about those groups which have
actually changed (more importantly, the messages that have changed!)
I'm willing to pay a first-time cost of 5ish minutes if I never have
to wait more than a few seconds afterwards.

Second, it ought to be able to deal with any sort of group (like
nnvirtual can) and not just nntp groups.  Does it do something heinous
like remember message-ids and assume that it can poll the news server
for them later?

Ah, well.  It was worth a try.  :)

John.