On Thu, Apr 06, 2023 at 11:11:40AM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote: > How do you find the description of, say, "dereference symbolic link" > (to take just a random example from the Emacs manual) when the actual > text of the manual include neither this string nor matches for any > related regular expressions, like "dereference.*link"? > > The way Info does it is to use the index (which should be present in > any respectable reference document) to find description of the > corresponding subject. The indexing, which is done by the author of > the document, if it's a good indexing, should include index entries > that specify subjects the reader could have in mind when he/she is > looking for this kind of information. > > The corresponding index-searching commands of Info readers are a > primary means for finding information quickly and efficiently, > avoiding too many false positives and also avoiding frustrating > misses, i.e., searches that fail to find anything pertinent. In the future, there should be a local documentation search driven by AI algorithms which handles synonyms and rewordings, so that if the user searched for "dereference", they also found text about "following a reference" even if the word "dereference" wasn't used. Think of it like a version of G**gle running on your own machine. Implementing such a thing is beyond me, though.
