John Cox

BeebleX PHP Search Engine

I have been following the development of BeebleX which on first glance is a good resource for the PHP Developer in me. There has been a great deal of hard work put into the engine from the folks at php|Architect and it is shaping up quite nicely. I do have some random thoughts from first impressions.

The Good

I really like the PHP Job Index. Bonus points for the RSS Feed being generated. I can see that being a huge time saver for those that are freelancers, or are looking for a job.

I also really like Blog listings being returned in the results. Sometimes the random thoughts from others on issues they have encountered gives me greater insight than hitting the PHP Manual. Bonus points for being able to filter the results.

Good Ideas

I like the PHP Mailing list results that are being returned. I don't know that I like them being returned with all of the results though. It seems on certain searches the mailing list results are weighted higher which makes the search a little more difficult to find relevant answers. I will probably stick with Gmane for searching mailing lists for the time being, as I like the range of mailing lists that are being searched in addition to just the PHP Lists. I understand BeebleX is new,

What I would love to see

I know what would be a great resource for me and I would imagine others, would be a search for Open Source php libraries / code in a single place. I don't know how viable that would and I don't know how relevant the results would be either. I do know though that I spend more time on Google searching for Open Source code to use and modify rather than searching mailing lists for answers. Perhaps what is needed is a directory and a spider to include PEAR and non-PEAR code in a single place.

Another great resource would be to search different PHP projects code documentation / PHPDoc / php XRef in one place. Once again, I don't know how viable this would be, but think of the positive reinforcement for proper documentation of code that could produce? I think there would need to be a wildcard search for this though, so if I was searching for forum code documentation I could maybe search "Forum: topic creation" and see how projects handle topic creation which would be different than how a blog application handles the same general feature.

Finally, I would love to see a search for security notices from the Phpsec mailing list. Gmail does this quite well for me now, but more results are always welcome.

Interface

I see where the interface is going, and I don't have many complaints. The search results are easy to read and the engine resembles Google, which I would assume is the intent. One thing that would be nice is to color code the links based on which database they are generated from. IE, mailing lists could be green, security could be red, blogs could be blue, etc. This may make deciphering the results just a bit easier.

Just some ideas though. I think the engine is a very good start as a standard resource for the PHP developer out there. The basics are there now, and I am looking forward to seeing the innovation that comes out of the project.

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