if you are scraping and parsing anyway, it would be nice if your search engine was indexing the most common board objects... For example, the username, DT rank, feedback, boards,... That way, you could use keywords, like you can in google (filetype:, site:,...).
But this wouldn't be like rebuilding the full forum on a database?
I mean, there are 2 ways to do this:
1.- You take all the forum data, and put it together on a database and then your search engine makes calls to that database. But for this, you will have to live update that database or at least have a cron job to add the new data each x time.
2.- Search for the data directly on the site, but for that, you would have to do some kind of hack to the current search engine.
If you have other way in mind i would love to know how it work.
It would be better if there was a way to improve SMF's search function or query the relational database directly, but i don't know if Theymos would give anybody direct access to the database or allow anybody to completely rework smf's soucecode .
I don't think he would, and for good reason offcourse... It would require absolute trust in the person building the search engine.
But you're right, it would be completely rebuilding bitcointalk's database, like several other members are doing aswell (more or less)..
Whenever i see somebody building extensions, offsite tools, proposing changes to SMF, i can't help but wonder how epochtalk is doing, and if epochtalk would solve the problem without requiring browser plugins, offsite tools, scraping,... Don't get me wrong: the current forum software lacks several features, and i'm happy if somebody builds them (even if it's on a different domain, or requires me to install a browser plugin), i just wonder wether we'll ever switch to the new forum software.
