to support the new time parser and search functions in YaCy a high
precision detection of date and time on the day is necessary. That
requires that the time zone of the document content and the time zone of
the user, doing a search, is detected. The time zone of the search
request is done automatically using the browsers time zone offset which
is delivered to the search request automatically and invisible to the
user. The time zone for the content of web pages cannot be detected
automatically and must be an attribute of crawl starts. The advanced
crawl start now provides an input field to set the time zone in minutes
as an offset number. All parsers must get a time zone offset passed, so
this required the change of the parser java api. A lot of other changes
had been made which corrects the wrong handling of dates in YaCy which
was to add a correction based on the time zone of the server. Now no
correction is added and all dates in YaCy are UTC/GMT time zone, a
normalized time zone for all peers.
- date navigation
The date is taken from the CONTENT of the documents / web pages, NOT
from a date submitted in the context of metadata (i.e. http header or
html head form). This makes it possible to search for documents in the
future, i.e. when documents contain event descriptions for future
events.
The date is written to an index field which is now enabled by default.
All documents are scanned for contained date mentions.
To visualize the dates for a specific search results, a histogram
showing the number of documents for each day is displayed. To render
these histograms the morris.js library is used. Morris.js requires also
raphael.js which is now also integrated in YaCy.
The histogram is now also displayed in the index browser by default.
To select a specific range from a search result, the following modifiers
had been introduced:
from:<date>
to:<date>
These modifiers can be used separately (i.e. only 'from' or only 'to')
to describe an open interval or combined to have a closed interval. Both
dates are inclusive. To select a specific single date only, use the
'to:' - modifier.
The histogram shows blue and green lines; the green lines denot weekend
days (saturday and sunday).
Clicking on bars in the histogram has the following reaction:
1st click: add a from:<date> modifier for the date of the bar
2nd click: add a to:<date> modifier for the date of the bar
3rd click: remove from and date modifier and set a on:<date> for the bar
When the on:<date> modifier is used, the histogram shows an unlimited
time period. This makes it possible to click again (4th click) which is
then interpreted as a 1st click again (sets a from modifier).
The display feature is NOT switched on by default; to switch it on use
the /ConfigSearchPage_p.html servlet.
occurrences within the (web) page documents (not the document
last-modified!). This works only if the solr field dates_in_content_sxt
is enabled. A search request may then have the form "term on:<date>",
like
gift on:24.12.2014
gift on:2014/12/24
* on:2014/12/31
For the date format you may use any kind of human-readable date
representation(!yes!) - the on:<date> parser tries to identify language
and also knows event names, like:
bunny on:eastern
.. as long as the date term has no spaces inside (use a dot). Further
enhancement will be made to accept also strings encapsulated with
quotes.
reger