General Questions

What is search.jboss.org?

http://search.jboss.org/ is a full-text search service for  jboss.org content. It is built using open source software and is running on our own infrastructure. As of now the service is in beta and only a portion of the community content is included in the index. The general goal is to make searching jboss.org easy, fast and fun while taking the taxonomy and semantics of our content into account.

Why are we developing it?

If you run a web site then it is always recommended to pay attention to good Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Our goals include improving SEO for jboss.org  in general and we are working on it. However big search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing are not aware about semantic information within our content as it currently cannot be expressed via semantic SEO techniques. We also cannot control when and how they  crawl the site to create their search indexes and how they rank and represent the results to users.

For example take such a simple thing as a project changing its name. Can you think of how long it can take for big search engines to realize this correctly? Or how about if you only want to search in the documentation for a specific project version? And how about if you want to search across selected mailing lists by specific authors and filter out everything that is older then one year? And what if you want to search only in email attachments? This is what the search.jboss.org service is designed to do.

Plus community users have been complaining about the search capabilities of jboss.org for a long time. Part of the problem is that each application at jboss.org (e.g. JIRA, FishEye, SBS) has its own search functionality and they aren't integrated together. search.jboss.org will provide an integrated full-text search across all our applications so users can simply type their request into the Search box in the header and search all content.

What can we expect in future releases?

Initially only  mailing list content at http://lists.jboss.org will be indexed but in subsequent releases we will add indexed content from our other applications, e.g. JIRA, Borg, SBS. The next content we expect to add is archived IRC transcripts from http://transcripts.jboss.org

We also want to provide as much semantic information on top of the content as possible to allow focussed navigation and filtering. And of course we want the search service to be as fast as possible. Finally we're always interested in hearing about other requirements from the community so please let us know if you have any ideas.

Can you index my content?

We intend to index all content stored on the jboss.org infrastructure. If you're a project lead or community member and  do not see your content included just let us know by emailing help@jboss.org.

Using  search.jboss.org

Which content is searchable via search.jboss.org?

Currently it's possible to search selected community mailing lists from http://lists.jboss.org

How can I use it?

Detailed help document can be found here: http://community.jboss.org/wiki/JBossCommunitySearchHelp

Is it optimized for mobile devices?

http://search.jboss.org/ was not optimized for mobile devices (iPad, iPhone, Android tables ... etc), but it should work without any significant issues. If you do run into any problems please let us know.