[Bioc-devel] on the future of the searchable mail archives - Bioc-devel

Mon, Jul 18, 2005 6:53 AM #

Dear developers,

The searchable mail archives have been around for a year and a half now. 

http://files.protsuggest.org/cgi-bin/biocond.cgi

The site turned out to be a lot more popular than I anticipated, 
typically it gets around 15 thousand searches per month. Of course
these measures are very inaccurate but even third of that would be
more than what I originally expected.

For more logs see: http://protsuggest.org/logs/ (no other active
service is currenlty hosted on this server)

I have no problem with doing it in the foreseeble future since I've
already set it up in a way that it takes very little effort about 15
minutes a month ... even though  I currently do not need to use BioC
in my research.

But you might want to think about  establishing a more official and
better integrated search mechanism for  the BioC site and archives.

best,

Istvan.

Istvan Albert,
Research Associate,
Bioinformatics Consulting Center,
Huck Institute for Life Sciences,
Pennsylvania State University
http://www.personal.psu.edu/iua1

Seth Falcon

Mon, Jul 18, 2005 7:36 AM #

Hi Istvan,

On 18 Jul 2005, istvan.albert at gmail.com wrote:

First off, thank you for maintaining the searchable mail archives.  As
your logs demonstrate, this service is greatly appreciated by the BioC
community.  

It sounds like it is time for the BioC community to plan for an
alternate mechanism (or perhaps just an alternate host) for the
searchable archives for the near future.

Would you be willing to send me (off list) some details on how you've
setup the search site?

Best,

+ seth

Gordon K Smyth

Mon, Jul 18, 2005 5:11 PM #

At 12:36 AM 19/07/2005, Seth Falcon wrote:

I actually find that google already provides a nice way to seach the 
archives. For example, to search for "paired-t" on the BioC mailing list I 
would search google for:

     paired-t site:http://stat.ethz.ch BioC

 From the user's point of view, this method has the advantage that the 
links returned point to the actual mail archive rather than to a copy of 
it. You can search all the R mailing lists at once simply by removing the 
'BioC' term at the end.

A simple way to achieve a BioC search mechanism from the Bioconductor www 
page would be to create a form which sends the search string to google 
after adding the appropriate site string.

Cheers
Gordon