Making Joomla!™ Better - Finder 2.0 Beta

The JXtended team is proud to announce the availability of Finder 2.0 Beta, the newest release of our Advanced Search system for Joomla 1.5.

Finder is a powerful search engine that gives you access to technology used by major search engines like Google™ and Yahoo!™. Finder 2.0 features a completely redesigned core engine for better search results, AJAX powered search suggestions based on the actual content of your site, an expanding selection of search plugins, and much more.

Building Better Results

The major focus of version 2.0 was rebuilding the core search engine to be more aware of language issues and nuances.

Natural languages, meaning, ordinary spoken languages, are notoriously difficult to analyze because of their irregularity and complexity. For example, when a user searches for joomla extensions, we should consider results that contain joomla extension (in singular form) but might not have a single occurrence of joomla extensions (in plural form). That is a relatively simple task but it becomes much more difficult when dealing with all the possible endings and variations of a word like "search" which could come in the form of searching, searched, searches, searchable, etc.

To deliver the best search results, we have to analyze every word in both its inflected and root form. Finder 2.0 takes advantage of language stemming technology to solve this problem and 2.0 ships with a basic English language stemmer as well as a wrapper for the Snowball stemmer package. The Snowball stemming package supports Danish, German, English, Spanish, Finnish, French, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Dutch, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, and Turkish; it is available in the PHP Extension Community Library.

Rochen customers will be happy to know that they can use the Snowball package out of the box with all shared hosting accounts. Customers with managed servers can have Snowball installed by opening a support ticket and asking them to install the PECL Stem package. Rochen has offered to do this free of charge.

But, looking at words one at a time will never help us see the big picture. To really understand what users are looking for, words have to be considered in combinations and phrases. After all, a bartender school is not the same as a school bartender. Finder 2.0 does this by splitting long sequences of words into two and three word phrases. Each word in the phrase is examined in detail on an individual level and in relationship to its surrounding words. This allows us to deliver more accurate search results by leveraging the implied context and relative scarcity of matching phrases to dramatically influence search result rankings.

Helping Users Get Results

Two new features were added to Finder 2.0 to help users get the most relevant search results: search suggestions and search query explanations.

Finder 2.0 uses unobtrusive AJAX to offer search query suggestions to users based on the actual content of your site. It is common for search engines to log user queries and offer them back as suggestions to other users but this is pointless if the suggestions won’t produce actual results. Finder's suggestions come directly from your site’s content so Finder will never make suggestions that can’t produce results.

Further, to help users understand how their search query is being interpreted, Finder 2.0 offers detailed explanations of queries to make sure users are getting what they asked for. Suppose a user is looking for Joomla extensions but they are not interested in any plugins so they enter joomla extension not plugin into the search form, Finder would explain the search query in simple language like, “assuming joomla is required, and extension is required, and plugin should be excluded, the following results were found.” The explanation makes it clear exactly which words are being considered and which are being ignored.

This becomes really helpful when a user enters something like joomla extension not plugin or module. Does the user mean plugin and module should both be excluded or exclude plugin and include module as an option? Finder will interpret it as, “assuming joomla is required, and extension is required, and module is optional, and plugin should be excluded, the following results were found.” Based on the explanation, it will be clear how the system is interpreting the query and then the user can adjust it, if necessary.

More Plugins, More Results

Of course, a cool new search engine core and a fancy new query parser aren’t all that helpful if your content isn’t being found. With the release of Finder 2.0 Beta we are extremely excited about releasing several new plugins for some of the most popular Joomla extensions available.

Given the rise in popularity of CCK-like tools in the Joomla community we are proud to offer plugins for both Zoo by YOOtheme™ and K2 by JoomlaWorks. Both of these plugins take custom fields into account when indexing their content and bring the power of truly advanced search to these extensions like nothing else can.

Many of you told us how much you wanted to be able to search the contents of documents and not just Joomla content. Finder 2.0 introduces really powerful functionality to do just that. In the related downloads section you will find plugins to search documents stored in DOCman by Joomlatools as well as a plugin to index documents found in directories of your choice on your Web site. We have worked hard to provide expanded support for indexing special document formats including DOC, DOCX, HTML, PDF, TXT and XML.

Also available for Finder 2.0 is a plugin for VirtueMart products. It isn't easy to get the right products in front of your customers in an e-commerce environment and an accurate search system is critical in helping to drive sales. Finder 2.0 can be a powerful ally in increasing sales and conversion rates for your business by helping your customers find the products they need.

UPDATE: To see the full list of search plugins available for Finder in addition to what comes in the main package, check out the Finder 2.0 Beta1 downloads page.

About the Beta Release

Finder 2.0 Beta was released to give early adopters and developers a look at what is coming with the stable release. Extension developers that want to offer truly advanced search engine support for their extensions will be able to build plugins based on the new API. Those who want Finder translated into their own language can begin translating it now as we do not expect changes to the language keys moving forward.

Help perfect the most advanced search system available for Joomla by testing it against your Web sites and let us know if you run across problems. The more exotic the content the better, the more content the better. We are really excited about Finder 2.0 and the possibilities it opens up for the future of Joomla and the Web.

As with any Beta release, Finder 2.0 is not yet ready for production Web sites. While we are happy with the stability and security of the system in its current form, it has not been as thoroughly tested and audited as our stable releases. For this reason we strongly suggest that you do not use the Beta in a production environment.

Package Contents

The Finder 2.0 Beta package includes the core search system, a search module, as well as an administrator “status” module. The Beta release package includes search plugins for Joomla Articles, Contacts, Web links; JXtended Catalog; JXtended Labels; JXtended Magazine Articles, Authors, Issues, and Publications.

Also available as related downloads are plugins for DOCman by Joomlatools; EventList events and venues; documents found on the filesystem; K2 by JoomlaWorks; VirtueMart; and Zoo by YOOtheme™. In addition to those, we have also made plugins available to add support for indexing Microsoft Word™ DOC and DOCX files as well as Adobe™ PDF files.

Installation Notes

Unlike most JXtended extensions, Finder 2.0 cannot be installed over an older version. You must uninstall any old versions of Finder on your site before installing the new package. Read more about how to install Finder.

Requirements

Finder 2.0 is the first JXtended extension to use the new JXtended Libraries 2.0. The Libraries will come bundled with the Finder package so there is no need to download any extra packages unless you need support for non-standard extensions.

Finder 2.0 also requires:

• PHP 5.2 or higher.
• MySQL 4.1 or higher.
• Expanded indexing support for files will require safe mode to be off and the popen() function to be callable for PHP.
• Non-Latin based languages require UTF-8 properties support for PCRE.

We also have a small PHP script to check your Web server for compatibility with Finder 2.0. Just download the package, extract the PHP file and upload it to your Joomla 1.5 site. It needs to be placed in the same directory as your configuration.php file and then called via your favorite Web browser by navigating to the URL of your Joomla site followed by “requirements.php”. For example, “http://jxtended.com/requirements.php”.

Subscribe to Finder now to experience the future of search for Joomla 1.5.