How do keyword searches on www.ros.org work?

asked 2012-08-01 15:00:56 -0500

Pi Robot
4046 ●134 ●158 ●192 http://www.pirobot.org/

Hello ROS Fans,

I am trying to understand the results of keyword searches on the www.ros.org Wiki (not answers.ros.org). For example, if I go to the home page and enter "speech recognition" (without the quotes), the resulting list does not include the gspeech package even though the phrase "speech recognition" appears on the Wiki page for gspeech. If I search using the keyword "gspeech" directly, the package is found.

Now if instead of the main Search box, I first click on the News link at the top of the Wiki home page, then enter "speech recognition" in that search box and click on the Text button, the first item in the list of results is the gspeech package!

So, would it be possible for the main Search box on the Wiki home page to return gspeech (among others) when searching on "speech recognition". Or at least, to have separate Text and Titles buttons like on the News page?

Thanks!
patrick

answered 2012-08-03 06:04:32 -0500

PerkinsJames
506 ●10 ●15 ●25

The answer to your question may be "it doesn't work." At least, that is what I am finding. Also, for some reason, google cant look through the ROS wiki pages, which is very disappointing because I'm sure many of the answers I need are hidden inside ROS wiki pages and for those to be included in a google search would be nice.

It would be great if someone would fix this site search issue.

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Comments

It seems that the wiki is excluded on purpose: http://ros.org/robots.txt. I guess it either follows edit links, or more likely hits the wiki too hard. I'm not sure if it's possible to tell the googlebot that it's OK to visit once daily or so.

dornhege ( 2012-08-03 08:02:30 -0500 )edit

I remember that things were working quite well at the beginning of this year, until one day something happened... not only that the wiki search engine no longer provides complete search results, but that some wiki pages become deprecated... anyone knows what happened?

Nan Jiang ( 2012-08-03 09:57:23 -0500 )edit

@Nan Jiang @dornhege Would be great to know the answers to these things. Wiki search functionality is actually pretty important for my projects...

PerkinsJames ( 2012-08-06 04:18:38 -0500 )edit

Looks like the robots.txt was updated and now shows /wiki/* as allow.