It occurs to me that all text search functions I've ever dealt with are extremely crapulent ... except for Google. It's such a simple function but it's fairly crucial and routinely screwed up.
I want a search function that is:
- whitespace insensitive
- punctuation insensitive
- case insensensitive always, unless I ask to search for something mixed-case
- searches through object titles firs, automatically
- has no backwards option
- has no useless options or modes
- supports complex logical operations
- supports the "nearby" predicate
- supports the "misspelling" predicate
- can search through a subset of objects
- can save searches and their results
- outputs results in the same format as what it operates on
by these I mean that if the tool operates on a directory of files then it will produce a directory of files as its results so that the results can be fed back into another search.
I also want a system where .song objects come with their lyrics, or can have their lyrics appended, and the search tool knows to search through the lyrics for song objects.
What I REALLY REALLY want is an AI, but I'll settle for the above.