Mimetic Poly-Alloy

A Quicksilver-inspired JavaScript search that favors consecutive matching characters.

Quicksilver is great to search using acronyms or shorthand. Where it's not a good fit is searching through lists of keywords.

The basic approach is to compute a score by counting the number of matched characters, add a point if it matches the start of a word, and return 2 raised to the power of the score.

"this is a test".score("test")  // 32

This search was calculated as such: 2^{(4 + 1)}.

"this is a test".score("is")  // 8
"this is a test".score("hi")  // 4

Here you can see that a match at the start of a word ranks much higher than in the middle. More examples can be found in the accompanying tests.

Usage

Mimetic Poly-Alloy uses the same API as Quicksilver. Drop the JavaScript file on your site and use the score method on a string of keywords. Give it a string to search for and it will return a score as a float.

list_of_keywords.score(search)

Note on Patches/Pull Requests

• Fork the project.
• Make your feature addition or bug fix.
• Add tests for it. This is important so I don't break it in a future version unintentionally.
• Commit.
• Send me a pull request. Bonus points for topic branches.

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2010 Larry Marburger. See LICENSE for details.