need search within a mailing list archive

[Karl Fogel]

Currently there is no way to search within a mailing list archive. For example, see

  https://lists.launchpad.net/launchpad-users/

Just adding a Google search box to the mailing list archive pages won't work. We don't want to send our users off site to Google search results; they didn't ask to leave Launchpad's UI and no-ads environment, they just did a search. Also, we couldn't restrict the results to hits under a particular path, as opposed to just under the domain "lists.launchpad.net". Not to mention private mailing lists.

Really, the way to solve this is probably to to roll a search engine into Launchpad. Doable, but non-trivial.

http://zooie.wordpress.com/2009/07/06/a-comparison-of-open-source-search-engines-and-indexing-twitter/ might offer some advice :-).

Note that search is one of the items mentioned in mailing list UI grab-bag bug #357775.

[Barry Warsaw (barry)]

Karl, didn't your archiver ui branch fix this?

[Karl Fogel (kfogel)]

Barry,

No, in the end I broke search out of bug #357775 and into this separate bug, because it's really its own task, and primarily a back-end mod more than a UI mod.