silvia [hiro]:
Hi all,
Re-adding Linus, since he got bumped from my reply.
On 2/11/19 4:07 PM, Alison Macrina wrote:
Hi all, I just realized this conversation stalled, and I'd like to bump it and figure out next steps.
Alison
Alison Macrina Community Team Lead The Tor Project
Thanks Alison for bumping this up again.
A while ago, Linus shared this summary (copied below).
The way I understand how UX would like to implement our search portal is that we should have different urls per website.
So if a user is on support.tp.o, they would access search at support.tp.o/search.
The issue on the sysadmin side is that our websites are static. So in order to run some search service that displays results on website.tp.o/search we would have to upgrade our infrastructure and spend considerably more.
Would something like search.website.tp.o work instead?
So we would have search.support.tp.o instead of support.tp.o/search. How does that sound?
I don't see any issue with doing it that way. Could the user check boxes to select just the support portal (or another portal)?
Alison
Cheers,
-hiro
On 11/16/18 9:22 AM, Linus Nordberg wrote:
emma peel emma.peel@riseup.net wrote Fri, 16 Nov 2018 07:41:00 +0000:
silvia [hiro]:
On 11/15/18 10:06 AM, emma peel wrote:
What I like about the 'central search' idea is that you can get a User Manual result when searching Tor Support... because we have so many different pieces of content that I liked the idea of moving the user from one site to the other through the searches.
Is this still going to happen with your proposal?
I like that too, but I think UX wanted search results per portal?
I don't know about doing it project-wide, but I feel that for example support.torproject.org and tb-manual.torproject.org could share search results.
I think this is a good time for figuring out what Tor Project wants from a search function. I've put down a couple of statements sprinkled with questions below. Please jump in and argue against false statements and answer questions where possible. And please add more questions.
The web site support.tpo needs a search field and a button next to it resulting in the user seeing a list of matching url's (and their titles) in their browser.
What corpus would such a search look at? support.tpo only? support.tpo and tb-manual.tpo? More than that?
Are there other tpo sites that need/want a search function? Should search results include matches from other tpo sites as well, or only the one the user is currently visiting?
Sending the user to a separate site, say search.tpo, is considered not UX friendly enough.
Is search.<site>.tpo good enough?
Are we limited to using solr, as mentioned in #25322, or can we explore other options?
User fronting tpo web sites are "on the static rotation" because that's how we can keep them up and running given the resources at hand. Adding dynamic content, i.e. anything that is not "oh, that url corresponds to this file, let's send it to the user", would not be possible on our current set of VM's given the load we see on user facing tpo websites. This means that one of the proposed solutions with web servers proxying requests to a separate service, search.tpo, is not an option. Another argument against proxying is that it breaks the expectation of end-to-end security given by HTTPS.
Roger Dingledine:
On Fri, Nov 16, 2018 at 10:22:24AM +0100, Linus Nordberg wrote:
- Are we limited to using solr, as mentioned in #25322, or can we explore other options?
I have vague memories that Isa and Hiro explored other options, like outsourcing it to duckduckgo, but apparently the user flow was horrible. So, I don't know what constraints we want now, but there is some history of exploring other options.
- User fronting tpo web sites are "on the static rotation" because that's how we can keep them up and running given the resources at hand. Adding dynamic content, i.e. anything that is not "oh, that url corresponds to this file, let's send it to the user", would not be possible on our current set of VM's given the load we see on user facing tpo websites. This means that one of the proposed solutions with web servers proxying requests to a separate service, search.tpo, is not an option.
If there's some way to limit the number of searches (proxypasses) going at once, so a crawler doesn't take down (fill all the slots of) all of our static webservers, this idea might still be worth exploring. I feel a bit bad putting in place something that is so obviously going to be a source of ongoing pain, but I don't know of amazing better options that match all the other goals.
Another argument against proxying is that it breaks the expectation of end-to-end security given by HTTPS.
If we're proxying to another service running *on that same machine*, then I think we're ok on this point. It's just if we have some central separate search service that it would be a problem. So for example if solr is our choice, we could run a replicated solr on each webserver.
--Roger
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