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New Ruby Inside Tool: Google-powered Ruby Search

By Peter Cooper / October 25, 2006

Googlerubysearch

Hot on the heels of the last post comes a new feature to Ruby Inside.. a Ruby and Rails search engine powered by Google. It's on the front page here at Ruby Inside (link for those reading via RSS) and lets you search a bumper collection of Ruby and Rails sites in one go.
If you search for 'Integer' you get the Ruby class references, rather than the Java and Wikipedia links you get with Google.com, and you can use it as a quick, reliable way to pin down the Ruby information you need. So far there are 23 sites in the search engine, including the main reference sites, the Rails forum, and several key weblogs, but I'm adding more sites over time. Leave a comment against this post if you want to suggest a site for the search engine.

Comments

  1. Rory McCune says:

    Hi,

    Is there a list of sites that your co-op searches already? I was looking a co-op yesterday and create a brief list of sites here http://raesene.dnsalias.net/blog/archives/000394.html which may be of use (if you've not got all of them already!)

    cheers

    Rory

  2. Arjen says:

    Would be cool if there was a Firefox search plugin that would use the google co-op search!

  3. Peter Cooper says:

    The list so far:

    http://rubyforge.org/h
    http://poignantguide.net/
    http://www.rubycentral.com/
    http://www.rubycorner.com/
    http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/
    http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/

    Breaking up the list so it doesn't look like link spam.

    http://blog.caboo.se/
    http://codefluency.com/
    http://www.fearoffish.co.uk/
    http://errtheblog.com/
    http://glu.ttono.us/
    http://blog.testingrails.com/
    http://blog.hasmanythrough.com/

    And again..

    http://www.puneruby.com/blog/
    http://on-ruby.blogspot.com/
    http://eigenclass.org/
    http://www.loudthinking.com/
    http://jobs.rubynow.com/
    http://nubyonrails.com/
    http://railsforum.com/
    http://ruby.guruza.com/

    And once more..

    http://blog.segment7.net/
    http://drnicwilliams.com/
    http://caboo.se/doc/
    http://www.bigbold.com/snippets/tag/ruby
    http://www.rubyinside.com/
    http://www.ruby-doc.org/
    http://www.ruby-lang.org/
    http://redhanded.hobix.com/
    http://www.rubyfilter.com/
    http://www.rubyonrails.org/

    I'll take a look at your list now though!

  4. Peter Cooper says:

    From your list I have added:

    http://www.height1percent.com/
    http://www.ryandaigle.com/
    http://blog.t0fuu.com/
    http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/
    http://www.railtie.net/
    http://www.rubyonrailsblog.com/
    http://curthibbs.wordpress.com/
    http://www.softiesonrails.com/
    http://cardboardrocket.com/
    http://www.straw-dogs.co.uk/blog/
    http://www.rubyonrailsforum.com/
    http://www.ruby-forum.com/

  5. Peter Cooper says:

    Also just added the ruby-talk mailing list directly.

  6. Satish Talim says:

    The first one in the list should be
    http://rubyforge.org/
    and not
    http://rubyforge.org/h

  7. Peter Cooper says:

    Arjen: Your wish is my command. Go to http://www.rubyinside.com/search/ and you can click a single button and get a Firefox search tool for this ;-)

  8. Peter Cooper says:

    Sorry about that. That was a typo when I was cleaning up the list for pasting in here, and the engine itself uses the right one :)

  9. Rahsun McAfee says:

    Very nice tool. This should be very useful!

  10. keith says:

    is there anyway we could get this as a google gadget? i would love to put this on my "personalized homepage"

  11. MarFarMa says:

    Google Co-op has been described as a surprisingly poor attempt at copying Swicki functionality.

    I've been playing with Swickis for a little while now, and had created this one: http://ror-swicki-swicki.eurekster.com/ It doesn't get a lot of traffic to date, so it's tag cloud is lame. I've just updated it with the list of sites from these comments.

    Try it and see if you like it. If you do like it, it's available to be put on anyone's site. The code to do so is here: http://swickihome.eurekster.com/share.htm?gid=980ec622-471a-4c11-a614-1e0afe1829e9

    The nice thing about Swicki is the community learning feature. You can vote results up or down, suggest sites to add, etc. Recommended results for a search end up highlighted with a small icon on the left of the result. And the tag cloud is pretty cool. Nice Ajaxy interface.

    I've seen pretty amazing results in my other swicki, which is searched 50 - 150 times per day. The domain for that swicki is somewhat obscure, with the results you were looking for typically found on the 20th search results page, more often than not. Searching throught the Swicki now that it's been 'well trained' actually brings up the results you want on the first page. Very nice!

  12. Peter Cooper says:

    Thanks for posting that info. I'm sure some will find it useful. I must admit, however, I don't really have the time or interest while searching to do things like rank or tag the results.

  13. MarFarMa says:

    No swicki searcher is asked to tag links. After the creator provides the starting set of tags, the tag cloud gets built automatically. Every new search term gets suggested to the swicki maintainer as a tag. The maintainer then votes them up or down, as to whether they belong in the tag cloud. The size of terms relative to others, indicates the frequency the search is performed.

    The tag cloud is a nice feature to let people see what searches others are doing - but other than that, it's just decoration. I happen to like it YMMV.

  14. Gene Tani says:

    Rollyo lets you do something vaguely similar, tho I can't find info on how it's searching, whether it's running Lucene/ferret, doing any kind of PageRank approximation etc.

    http://rollyo.com/explore.html?rollterm=ruby&x=0&y=0

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