Hatem’s Diaries

Marco tabini announced in his blog the born of Beeblex, a PHP search engine.

BeebleX works in a way that is orthogonal to most other search engines. Where a site like Google is mostly automated, BeebleX indexes hand-picked resources that are PHP-specific. Where Google tries to run your search against as many sources as possible, BeebleX categorizes its data sources and allows you to restrict the search field to what you need.

The idea of a PHP search engine is great, I dunno why its called Beeblex ( is there something related to the Bible ? ), but I found it is very fast but results aren’t relevant.

For example searching for PHP, the first result is PHP3 vs. PHP4 numbers ??? There is also some accessibility problems, after searching try guess where are you “All databases”, “php|a News”, or any other ?? or will you look to URL to know it, Well this one is more easy to resolve …

As marco said Beeblex isn’t yet complete and there is many technical and a structural things to do as the the relevance algorithm. But I guess it could be great search engine for PHP with PHP specific stuff for example :

• You can search for a php function where it appear in the manual and see blogs that talking about that function ( Combine of more than one category in results and not all of them )
• You can search for php books, we can see the popular books (the more relevant ones) … etc
• Also possible courses, or certifications centers (could be even mixed with GMaps)
• Make a new category for Technical PHP Tutorials, Articles … etc. Somebody looking for example for “PEAR LiveUser” can find easily if there is articles about it.

I guess there is many other great things that we can do, and since Google can give us the most relevant results (news, groups, articles,books, …) so how Beeblex could make the difference for PHP developpers and anybody interested to PHP ?

Source Marco Tabini’s Weblog

Tags: No Tags