Support server-side search

Open NfNitLoop opened this issue 3 years ago • 0 comments

The current client-side search is a bit of a hack. It's a brute-force search back through history, so is O(n) and uses O(n) network requests. (And network traffic, if you haven't got a cached copy of the Items locally.)

SQLite actually supports full text search indexes! Could add an option to enable it, and let servers advertise that they support server-side search, at which point clients can use that.

Use cases:

All

Sort by search relevance
Allow users to choose which users' posts to search

Search My (a) Feed

A user is viewing their feed in the UI.
Enters a search term in the search filter.
That UI calls the server-side search to find items that match.
Order by search relevance
Only show things in the user's feed. (option to tell server which user's feed to search? Though maybe this is too much a specialization and it should just accept a list of userIDs to search?)

Server Search

Just search "all" users on a server.
Should we have a way for users to opt into/out of being globally searchable on servers?
- Possibly limit it to servers that their profile claims to be hosted on?
- What are the defaults?
A way for server admins to further limit what's globally searchable/discoverable?