Ubuntu Wiki

Launchpad spec: [https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+spec/integrated-desktop-search]

A powerful search mechanism deeply integrated with the desktop.

Possible points of integration:

• Nautilus search (Konqueror?)
• Filechooser
• Panel applet
• Web browser (index page content)
• General search interface capable of searching all available contents
• Tagging of anything, files, music, images, emails, news
• Others?

Resources

[http://beaglewiki.org Beagle] is the obvious candidate for the indexing engine, but there is also the black horse [http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/Tracker Tracker] currently developed by [http://jamiemcc.livejournal.com Jamie McCracken]. Beagle is the more mature of the two, but Tracker has some advantages over Beagle. A few notable points

• Beagle is developed by Novell which means it will have plenty of cooporate support
• Beagle is written in C#, which makes for a rather large dependancy (storage wise)
• Tracker is written in C and communicates with other apps over a DBUS interface
• Tracker is extremely lightweight, and might even be suitable for embedded systems
• Tracker uses mature technologies such as mysql and libextractor instead of in-development technologies
• Tracker is able to store file metadata on demand
• Tracker has an integrated keyword/tagging functionality for all first class objects

Comments

• KillerKiwi : I think this is all covered by Beagle / Nautilus Search and Deskbar in Dapper

  • MikkelKamstrupErlandsen : Nautilus is not linked against Beagle, so it does not utilize the searching capabilties of it. Also beagle is not integrated into the filechooser (as I think Novell is doing), or in the web browser for that matter. The keyword is integration.

• MikkelKamstrupErlandsen : The recent developments on Tracker shows that it is maturing really fast. I have been using 0.0.4 on several boxes for a good while, and I'd say that it mathes (or outperforms) Beagle on both stability, memory and speed. The only setback is the number of "backends", where Tracker still misses things as news, emails and tomboy notes - they will arrive eventually though. The very energetic move would be for Ubuntu/Canonical to sponsor Jamie to work on Tracker. This would be a move that would position Ubuntu/Canonical has bleeding edge technology contributors to the free desktop along side Novell and Red Hat.