Re: Search engines (was: HTML-Info design)

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Lars Ingebrigtsen <address@hidden>
> Date: Sun, 28 Dec 2014 19:00:16 +0100
> 
> An interesting problem is Emacs and searching.  The various Gnus mail
> backends have various searching interfaces, but it would be nice to have
> a more general Emacs searching mechanism, where you can search parts of
> directory trees, etc.

Search for what, exactly?  Only for text inside files (like Mairix
does for mail archives), or something more general?

With the exception of text files, searching anything else for text
needs libraries or programs that are capable of accessing text within
those files, and also some way of providing an easily-followable
reference to the found text.  Do we really have Free Software
solutions for these problems?

> the main work is in understanding the various file formats
> and keeping the reverse index updated when files change.

The second part is a cron job, nothing else.  Or am I missing
something?

> If there were OS-level search stuff we could just hook into, that
> would obviously be better.

Is there?

> And provide searching in the Emacs manuals.

We already have "M-x info-apropos", which comes close.