Yesterday I discussed Beagle and Tracker with regards to their preferences settings, the time to index a collection of both HTML and PDF files, and how to extract information from individual files. In this article I'll go over the interfaces used to submit queries and the syntax used for complex queries for both projects.

I tested each tool by doing searches on a couple of common terms. I was surprised at the different results I got searching for the word "ethernet." Although it is obviously only a single search, Tracker returned what might be the most relevant result as the top item. Beagle showed the networking HOWTO as the fifth result (shown as "Networking" in the results), with the HOWTO indexes scoring higher than the individual HOWTOs. The Ethernet HOWTO that Tracker offered as it's top hit is much more applicable to the search term.

The Beagle search interface only show the number of documents up to a maximum of 100 hits, while Tracker allows you to see the total number of matches and page through them all.

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