new OLAC-oriented search engine

[Baden Hughes]

Dear OLAC Implementers,

A new service has recently been added to the LDC site, namely an OLAC
Search Engine [1].

This search engine complements other OLAC search engines including those
already deployed at LinguistList [2]. This instantiation takes an entirely different
approach, and aims to be very similar to key-word-based web search engines.

Other features of the search engine include:

- search by alternate names using the Ethnologue
- search by language code
- key word in context highlighting in search results
- search for similar spellings
- exact/approximate/partial string matching
- search operators (AND, OR, NOT, +, -)
- support for inline syntax (eg creator:hale)
- search for related items on Google.

The search engine results are displayed according to the quality of the
metadata on a per record and per archive basis. These rankings are derived from the same underlying
algorithm used in the OLAC Archive Reports [3].

The service was developed by Amol Kamat, Baden Hughes, and Steven Bird
at the University of Melbourne, with sponsorship from the Department of
Computer Science and Software Engineering.  We welcome your feedback.

Regards

Baden Hughes

[1] http://wave.ldc.upenn.edu/olac/search.php
[2] http://cf.linguistlist.org/cfdocs/new-website/LL-WorkingDirs/olac/olac-search-advanced.cfm
[3] http://www.language-archives.org/tools/reports/archiveReportCard.php?archive=all