Intranet problem: searching inside native files
In October last year, when I was revamping our intranet portal to be powered by Textpattern, one of my colleagues commented: The (live)search feature is really nice and all, but can it search through native files such as pdf, doc and xls?
He was referring to a ton of reference material, reusable stuff in native files that we have. I shook my head sheepishly to convey that our portal couldn’t search native files, but indexing them on pages with links, keywords and titles would help a bit.
And no, we are not just about to jump to converting everything into html in order to make it searchable. Doing so is not only time consuming, painstaking, it’s just plain stupid. No, we are not going to do that.
But the question continues to stump me. More than that, it bothers me. When Google Desktop was released, I thought this problem was solved. But, it didn’t.
Here is my problem: I can install Google Desktop on a server that serves all the intranet content to users. But I can’t provide a Google Desktop interface within our intranet page.
To use Google Desktop, the user needs to access the computer physically or via a VNC which—to me—completely defeats the purpose (of the intranet). A classic chicken and egg case. I mean, the technology is right there–staring in my face–and yet, I cannot harness its power.
It could be as simple as a including a Google Desktop search form within the template with a couple of radio options [1]search portal [2]search raw server files. Option [1] would search from the database (default CMS search). Option [2] would search native files, parked in the server, that are meant to be served to users using Google Desktop installed on the server).
Has anyone ever embedded a Google Desktop search form inside your intranet portal page to serve from a webserver? There might even be a “slap-on-the forehead” simple technique to go about doing this, but I haven’t been able to see it so far. If you’ve done such a thing before, and if you’re reading this, I would be really interested in knowing how you could.
The following comments were lost when this site went offline in April 2006. Thanks to a tip by Jax, I was able to salvage them via Google Reader.
May 17, 06 at 02:17