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This article explores the process of taking HTML content from Drupal nodes and indexing it for the purpose of search and text retrieval at a later time. The code examples apply to Drupal 6.

Finding what to index

Acquia has been selected as a finalist in the Collaboration and Social Networking category for the 2008 MITX Technology Awards. This is the fifth year MITX has offered the awards to recognize innovative companies and technologies in the New England region across nine categories:

In the same way that the Internet itself would not have achieved greatness without the ability to search it easily and efficiently, Drupal’s greatness will always be tied directly to the effectiveness of its core search solution. Improving core search for Drupal 7 will be no small task, however. The current implementation is both elegant but complex, robust yet inflexible. The seven coders participating in the Minnesota Search Sprint this weekend have a great challenge as well as a great opportunity. Here are some of the things we hope to achieve:

• Identify the most important weaknesses in Drupal search and create a project plan for fixing them.
• Identify the most important new features currently missing from Drupal search and clear the roadblocks for implementing them.
• Increase the test coverage for Drupal search.
• Increase general developer awareness and knowledge of search.

A large part of what we will be doing is evaluating and planning. Without a roadmap and common understanding of what search is to become, little progress will be made in the Drupal 7 development cycle. However, a coding sprint is all about code, and we’ll be writing some of that, too. Specifically I’m hoping that we’ll be able to fix one of the top-five bugs, increase search module’s test coverage, and come up with a first attempt at one of the top-five new features.

That’s a lot! No matter what we manage to code during the three days together, we’ll walk away with a high level of agreement about our goals for the next months, and plenty of homework to do.

We’ll post regular updates that you can follow on Planet Drupal, as well as in the search group, and we’re all ears if you have suggestions or wishes. For anyone wanting to catch up on their search related reading, here are some links:

Two weeks ago I attended a joint Web 2.0 (conference) and Web2Open (unconference) two part session on building a social strategy for your business. Web 2.0 and social software luminaries Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff presented a session " how to have a successful social strategy" based on their extensive research and book "Groundswell".

Today I participated in the Sigma Partners VP of Marketing Summit for their portfolio companies. Roger Krakoff asked Gitti Crowley of HiWired and I to lead a discussion about online marketing best practices. In that discussion, I talked a little about a few marketing tools that we use and/or plan to use at Acquia and agreed to share links to the resources we discussed. Here's the rundown.

Drupal

Last week I helped organize Drupal day at Newstools 2008. At our peak, we had 65 journalist in the room and 35 watching online. We had several presentations:
* Introducing Drupal for Newspapers
* Showcase video (shown below)
* Jose Zamora on the Knight Drupal initiative

I think Sun/MySQL's Marten Mickos nailed it when he said "There's a difference between organizations that have more time than money and organizations that have more money than time". Read Savio Rodrigues' post on InfoWorld and Matt Asay's post on CNET for more background.

Acquia is participating in another Launch Pad event, this time for the Enterprise 2.0 conference. For this Launch Pad event, technology companies were asked to submit a one-minute video pitch to be voted on by the Enterprise 2.0 community. There will be multiple rounds, with four companies eventually on stage at the Enterprise 2.0 conference to present and demonstrate in front of a live audience.

We've set up an Acquia channel on the Blip.tv site - acquia.blip.tv. We'll be posting new videos, screen casts and demos here for folks to check out and share.

Acquia was one of six companies chosen to present at the Launch Pad event at the Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco last week. Selection for Launch Pad was a great honor - more than 150 companies submitted applications - and a tremendous opportunity to showcase Drupal to the 10,000 attendees at the Web 2.0 Expo.