[Xapian-discuss] patent searches with xapian

[Philip Neustrom]

Very cool stuff!  I'm glad there are folks out there such as yourself
working on interesting and helpful projects like this!

A quick note after looking over some searches:

  * The highlighting is cool.  You should use Xapian to tell you what
the stemmed version of your query is, index your words->{x,y}
transformation based on the stemmed words rather than simply the
explicit word->{x,y} transformation it seems you're doing now.  For
example, searching for "computer" yields, as expected, results
containing only the word "computing," yet the word "computing is not
highlighted.

  * It might be worthwhile to have traditional text snippets next to
the images for helping with quick "is this relevant?" look-throughs.

--Philip Neustrom

On 10/27/06, Kevin Webb <kevin at tackledesign.com> wrote:
> Folks,
>
> I'm writing simply to say thanks for building such a great piece of
> software! I've been working with Xapian since the summer to construct
> an interface for searching the complete US patent collection back to
> 1836 (the US Patent Office only offers searches back to 1976). It's
> been a joy to use Xapian and I'm quite pleased with the search results
> we've received. Our initial test system is now online and allows
> searching of documents between 1836 and 1925 (about 1.5 million
> documents):
>
> http://search.allpatents.org/
>
> We're working with folks at HP Labs to perform the OCR extraction on
> the original page images which were scanned by the patent office. As
> the OCR effort continues we'll expand our collection to include all US
> patents.
>
> Feel free to explore and make comments - if you have any thoughts on
> how we might improve the interface or the search indexing I'd be glad
> to chat! I may also write up a summary on how we've managed the text
> over image markup implementation with Xapian (it's nothing
> particularly fancy but may be of use to others none the less!)...
>
> Thanks again for all your work!
> Kevin Webb
>
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