Building A Full-Text Index In Javascript

Building A Full-Text Index In Javascript(garysieling.com)

70 points by olivernn 13 years ago | 11 comments

knowtheory 13 years ago |

This is pretty cool, but the fundamental problem is still that you (or someone else) have to load an entire PDF (or set of PDFS) before you can use the full text indexing to search it.

If you're running a service (say like DocumentCloud) you're way better off precomputing a full text index on ingest and providing a search API than shunting over substantial parts of your stored documents.

Definitely cool as a piece of gear, but not terribly practical from a client-side perspective i'd think.

garysieling 13 years ago | |

Yes, that is certainly true. The other issue with the technique I see is if I tried to scale this I'd probably hit some maturity issues with these libraries.

For what it's worth, it looks like DocumentCloud uses Open Calais, which is a Thomson Reuters product - I used to work there in a different division, they have a bunch of interesting products in this space.

knowtheory 13 years ago | | |

Oh neat, what'd you do at Thomson Reuters?

I notice your blog is filled with NLP related goodies. I've been meaning to screw around with Stanford NER lib, to see if i can train up some custom recognizers for particular document domains of any utility.

xaritas 13 years ago | |

> Definitely cool as a piece of gear, but not terribly practical from a client-side perspective i'd think.

Perhaps for PDFs are proprietary or sensitive. A related use case is transformation and extraction. I used this same technique recently for a client to turn VB6-generated PDF reports into HTML tables for preview, and sending the actual data to a service endpoint as JSON.

arafalov 13 years ago | |

Lunr.js does provide a way to pre-compile the index on the server side. Check out the discussion and implementation in progress of using the pre-compilation for Jekyll: https://github.com/olivernn/lunr.js/issues/26 .

Ygg2 13 years ago |

Now all we need is for someone to port an LibreOffice editor in JavaScript :)

garysieling 13 years ago | |

Yeah, the thought crossed my mind. There are enough people trying to make online products like Google Docs or places to post Powerpoint presentations that it may have already happened somewhere internally. Or, maybe everyone is just using LibreOffice/Muhimbi and doing it all on the server.

binarymax 13 years ago |

lunr.js looks pretty nice, seems very useful for tiny browser based stuff. For something a bit more heavyweight, I've used natural node[1] which is quite good - though not available in browser.

https://github.com/NaturalNode/natural

garysieling 13 years ago | |

That one looks neat - it has some interesting NLP features like Wordnet integration and bayes classification.