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Search for PHP

searchforphp.com

105 pointsboyter58 comments

Don't forget to have it search http://stackoverflow.com in the various php tags. Also, having it search the various framework site's articles, question sites, documentation, etc would be very useful as well.

Bonus points if it ranks by textual relevance + # of upvotes on SO

Consider it in the pipeline. I am adding this as a must to do.

Thanks!

I add those soonish. I am still sourcing places to crawl and index at this point. That would be an excellent start.

Not sure if your indexing my forums, but DevNetwork.net might also be a good resource to index. =)

Am I doing something wrong, or should this query return more results?

http://www.searchforphp.com/?s=needle+haystack

EDIT - For those who can't get the page to load, here are my results:

    * grapheme_strstr
      (PHP 5 >= 5.3.0, PECL intl >= 1.0.0) grapheme_strstr — Returns part of haystack string from the first occurrence of needle to the end of haystack.
      string grapheme_strstr( string $haystack, string $needle[, bool $before_needle = false] )

    * grapheme_stristr
      (PHP 5 >= 5.3.0, PECL intl >= 1.0.0) grapheme_stristr — Returns part of haystack string from the first occurrence of case-insensitive needle to the end of haystack.
      string grapheme_stristr( string $haystack, string $needle[, bool $before_needle = false] )

    * iconv_strrpos
      (PHP 5) iconv_strrpos — Finds the last occurrence of a needle within a haystack
      int iconv_strrpos( string $haystack, string $needle[, string $charset = ini_set("iconv.internal_encoding")] )

    * iconv_strpos
      (PHP 5) iconv_strpos — Finds position of first occurrence of a needle within a haystack
      int iconv_strpos( string $haystack, string $needle[, int $offset = 0[, string $charset = ini_set("iconv.internal_encoding")]] )

Hi!

It probably should. Could you let me know what you would be expected it to display? I can then figure out its doing wrong.

It's not fair to compare you to Google, but if you're returning results from php.net, I thought I'd see some of the more higher-profile pages:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aphp.net+needle+haystac...

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Aphp.net+needle+haystack

Looks like the score isn't calculating as well as I would have expected. I will tweak my relevance algorithms to fix this.

Thanks for the feedback!

Very nice fade in effect when results are shown - soothing and not too jarring.

I'd suggest that when no results are found that a message is displayed to that affect. There is currently no feedback to tell if the system is still loading, broken or has found no results at the moment.

Agreed on both points! That fade is a nice little touch and the system needs to provide users with feedback on what it's doing.

I will do that! Added to my list of things to implement. Cheers!

Neato! Worked snappy for me. Kudos.

Suggestion: It appears that the searches sometimes stacked up in queue if I typed fast. (i.e. if I typed a long sentence quick the results continued to flash different content many times, playing catch-up. Looked through the JS quick and I see you are trying to prevent this with runningRequest1/2 so maybe it's the short delay in the .fadeTo() after the GET callback. Try moving the runningRequest = false into the fadeTo callback.

Also, .fadeTo() has a default queue of it's own. You could also add .stop() like this:

    $('#function').html(data).stop().fadeTo('fast',1);

Otherwise, really cool! I use "site:php.net foobar" most of the time but this would be a great little widget.

Thanks! This is my first real play with jQuery. I have added this to my bug queue and will be fixing it in a few hours. Cheers for the tip!

Here's another: you're searching on any keyup which creates lots of overhead. Google's implementation is more complex. It appears they search immediately as you type the first few characters on each keyup/down then if the word goes over a few characters it switches to querying every couple seconds, or until you hit the spacebar. It also seems like they have another timer if you pause after a second or two.

If it's just you using this, I would say don't give a crap. But if you plan to allow others to use it and it gains a userbase at all you might consider a similar approach for obvious reasons.

Cheers!

I was looking into this but havent yet been able to make it work smoothly. Since you have raised it I will focus on getting it working.

I have quite a list of things to improve now.

You may want to put in something that only searches if they havn't pressed a key after so many seconds.

I would assume that most of us type at a fairly constant rate so maybe check each keystroke to see how long its been since the last one and maybe if 500 ms have passed, then go ahead and fire off some search results.

Try using http://code.google.com/p/jquery-debounce/ - it creates a throttle/debounce function for you, so the submit would only be called at most every X ms, no matter how often the event fires. It's super useful.

Fast. I wanted to do something like this for code-completion, but with tagclouds. Still do in fact.

In searchforphp.com, function names are search-completed alphabetically. Could you sort them by their usage? Such as token frequency in a corpus of actual PHP source code?

Thanks!

Actually I was looking into doing that. I just need to get a large enough corpus to crunch on. I will probably download a few of the larger CMS's and frameworks and do this.

Want some help? There is a contact page on the website listed in my profile. I have side projects. Maybe we could trade tasks.

I might take you up on the offer! Cheers!

Very cool and extremely useful.

First thoughts:

The site is slow for me.

There's no feedback indicating the system has captured user input.

On my first visit, I immediately started typing random function names into the search box ('strlen', 'htmlentities', 'func_get_args', etc).

I had no idea anything was going on and assumed that my search returned no results.

It's only when I tabbed out for a few moments and tabbed back that I saw the site worked at all.

When I saw the results, though, my reaction was something like "Wow, that's awesome."

Yes its something I need to fix. Im thinking for the very first search ill display a "loading" image, because after that the results fade out a little when you start searching again.

The speed is probably due to the site being hammered. Its only a small VPS and probably not coping very well. Thanks for the feedback though!

Sorry everyone about the problems with load. It should be somewhat more responsive now. It was down to me leaving KeepAlive on in the httpd.conf for Apache.

Turned it off and everything is responsive again.

Neat idea, especially to a fellow non-IDE using full-time PHP coder such as myself. That said, I tried the first search that came to mind "cast to string" And didn't really get any useful results. First result was for JSON, and the link from php.net was for stripos.

The result I expected, and which I got as the first result in Google was: http://php.net/manual/en/language.types.type-juggling.php

Ah I know the problem. I actually haven't indexed the whole of the PHP manual. I was just going for MVP.

I will index that and ensure the search results appear as they should.

Inclusion of GitHub results would be awesome. They have a search API so it should be fairly easy.

I actually did this with Google code for a while, but removed it due to speed issues. I will have a look at the github api though and see if it is any faster.

10/24/10, 10:05pm EST, took minutes to load page initially.

Sorry about that.... its hosted on a Westhost VPS and is probably a little oversold. Its struggling at the moment.

naw, no sorries, just thought I'd try to give you something more concrete than "Iz not work."

Here's a list of Firefox's Ubiquity to search for PHP functions, etc ... https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity/Commands_In_The_Wild#...

this is simple and much like google.com which i like, no advertisements or wordy introductions, and the main function is bright and center. the ui could use a bit of a makeover, but i think you've got something functional and should keep expanding the functionality before investing time on the ui part since it seems that you're the only developer at the moment.

what storage solution do you use for indexing?

and perhaps i'm getting penalized by the latency since i'm in shanghai, but it seems that the response time is pretty slow.

Thanks! UI is not my strength, but thats all I could come up with.

The indexing is very much a hybrid consisting of sphinx, mysql fulltext, and a custom solution of python and php.

As for the speed, the site is being hammered... since its only on a little VPS its not coping too well at the moment. I am located in Sydney Australia and its a little slow for me at the moment too. Usually its not too bad though.

OK, clearly you are on a running horse...but have you considered a version for Python?

Yes I have. Most of the people I work with are asking for a dotnet one so I am planning on doing that first, but yes Python is on the radar, and mostly done.

+1 for python.

http://www.searchforpython.com/

Will update it soonish!

+1 for .NET, too!

http://www.searchfordotnet.com/

Will update it soonish!

link doesn't work

Errr thats because I just registered it :)

Having it working around PHP's inconsistency in function naming would be great, e.g. if I look for "str_pos" the first result should be "strpos".

This looks really nice, great job. I like it and I'm going to try and use it over the next couple weeks, I'll let you know how it goes.

Thanks! Would really appreciate feedback as I improve things. Im pushing almost daily updates at this point, just need to know if they are useful or not.

very cool site!

Can i ask how you are "getting" the data? Are you compiling the data locally (i would assume via scraping/APIs) and putting it in a full text search engine or are you hitting various services for every search (via APIs?) for every search?

love the site -- its simplicity and bareness have a certain charm.

At the moment through the following,

Web Crawler (custom) RSS crawler (custom) Grep/Parsing of various API references and the like. API's of certain services.

Pretty much everything is hosted locally on the machine though.

I tried a few queries, and honestly I find Google's Auto Suggest to be of more use when searching for PHP functions.

Fair enough. I will be aiming to improve relevance for functions since that seems to be the main feedback.

One of those cases where the way I search for functions is not the way everyone else does. I now have a lot of data to allow me to really improve things. The function relevance is very high on the list now.

Awesome. I'm looking forward to seeing what you come up with.

where's the foreach loop? http://php.net/foreach

I haven't actually added control structures yet. I just went with functions.

In short its on the to do list, but I figured this was enough to get me started.

Why should I use this instead of php.net?

Great job!

Nice!

No blowhard, just a cool service.

Want some work?

richardlauren@me.com

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