388035 - be Search Feature Tracking

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Mozilla Localizations :: be / Belarusian, defect)

Description

[Siarhei]

Attachment: list of search engines

I want to add some search engines in Belarusian Firefox:

tut.by - the most popular Belarusian site. The search is available at http://search.tut.by/

be.wikipedia.org - Belarusian wikipedia.

be-x-old.wikipedia.org - Belarusian wikipedia (classic writing)

Also I want to add some Russian search our users want to have:
ru.wikipedia.org-be
yandex.ru-be
lingvo.yandex.ru-be

Comment 1

[Siarhei]

Attachment: be search plugins

Comment 2

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

Sorry for the delay here.

Mic, can you have a look at this and ask the right questions, if you need to?

Comment 3

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

This one is still needs-mic.

Comment 4

[Mic Berman]

hi Siarhei
my apologies for my delay.
can you give me the final list of search plug ins you would propose and in the order you would propose them. (I cannot open your attachment in comment 1)

also - i apologize if this is a bad question - why also have the classic writing Belarusian wikipedia site and new one? from what i understand the classic is old from 19century, is it still widely used?

thanks
mic

Comment 5

[Siarhei]

(In reply to comment #4)

Hi Mic

I would like to have the following search engines:
Google
Yahoo
amazondotcom
answers
creativecommons
eBay
tut.by
be.wikipedia.org
be-x-old.wikipedia.org
ru.wikipedia.org-be
yandex.ru-be
lingvo.yandex.ru-be

We have two Belarusian writings.
1) Classic is original Belarusian writing.
2) Official was created by communist government in 1933 to make Belarusian looks and sounds like Russian as mush as possible. They tried to remove all things those  make the  languages different. The grammatical rules of the language was changed. Also they replaced many Belarusian words with Russians ones adapted to Belarusian rules. For example, *прыпынак* was replaced with *астаноўка* which is Russian word *остановка* where 'о' is changed to 'а'. (It sounds like Russian badly pronounced word).

Later, after Stalin death, local Belarusian government made revision of the rules and removed most obvious the language corruptions. But not all.

After the time the difference between classic writing and official one is not too big. It is like difference between British English and American one.
Classic writing uses soft character to show softness of previous consonant. For example, *сьнег* instead of *снег*. Also there are some difference in adapting of words coming from foreign languages.

Every writing system has its followers.
At first, articles in Belarusian Wikipedia were written with two systems. But later some "official" writers asked Wikipedia rulers to divide articles.
They simply removes classic articles and places them at be-x-old.wikipedia.org.
I think, it was not good idea. Nobody wants to divide English Wikipedia ever some articles use *center" instead of "centre".

So I have to place two search engines.

Comment 6

[Siarhei]

Could we remove amazondotcom, answers, creativecommons, eBay from list of search engines?

Comment 7

[Mic Berman]

Hi Siarhei
we can remove those.
researching the list you provided...
mic

Comment 8

[Mic Berman]

hi
can you confirm:
is tut.by a news portal type site?
yandex.ru-be -- this is a price/shopping site?
lingvo.yandex.ru-be -- ??

I can't really tell what these other sites are and I'd like to replace eBay and Amazon with other appropriate shopping sites
please advise

thanks!
mic

Comment 9

[Siarhei]

(In reply to comment #8)
Hi

> is tut.by a news portal type site?

Yes, tut.by is a news portal type site. But the provided search engine allows search on Belarusian pages.

> yandex.ru-be -- this is a price/shopping site?

Yandex.ru is search engine type site.

> lingvo.yandex.ru-be -- ??

lingvo.yandex.ru-be allows to perform search in dictionaries.

They are not shopping sites.
We could keep eBay and Amazon if we need shopping sites.

Comment 10

[Mic Berman]

for shopping/books Amazon may not make sense because they're so far away - not even sure if shipping + costs of books would be something users would do. 
eBay may work but again I'm not sure the useage in your area? do you know if not I can find out.
Otherwise it mike make more sense to use a European version of eBay and/or Amazon
mic

Comment 11

[Siarhei]

(In reply to comment #10)
> Otherwise it mike make more sense to use a European version of eBay and/or
> Amazon
> mic

I am not sure they would be useful. Our authorities take too high duty. Also buyers could have some technical problems with our customs (custom-house).

I propose http://www.oz.by/ as online shopping site. It is popular enough in our country. It is like Amazon.

Siarhei

Comment 12

[Mic Berman]

Siarhei
sounds good on www.oz.by - do we have a contact there I can ping to ensure we have  permission?

can you confirm, the final list of plug-ins would be:
Google
Yahoo
tut.by
be.wikipedia.org
be-x-old.wikipedia.org
lingvo.yandex.ru-be
oz.by
ru.wikipedia.org-be
yandex.ru-be

Comment 13

[Siarhei]

(In reply to comment #12)
> sounds good on www.oz.by - do we have a contact there I can ping to ensure we
> have  permission?
 
I think you could contact them at http://www.oz.by/about/post.phtml
Please set *Тема* to *Предложение сотрудничетсва*.

They promise to answer in 48 hours.

I tried to create the search plug-in on the site and found the problem:
The search is not full functional. They use a character set (KOI8-R) that does not contain two Belarusian letters: *і* and *ў*.

> can you confirm, the final list of plug-ins would be:

Yes, but I prefer the different order:

Google
Yahoo
tut.by
be.wikipedia.org
be-x-old.wikipedia.org
oz.by
ru.wikipedia.org-be
yandex.ru-be
lingvo.yandex.ru-be

Comment 14

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

Sorry for the delay here.

Should we not take oz.by then? Or can you lobby with them to fix it?

Regarding the order, I'll leave that up to Mic. Personally, I don't think we should order too much beyond google and yahoo. Everything after that will be ordered alphabetically by search engine name, and should be much easier to find this way. In particular when the list is already rather long.

Comment 15

[Siarhei]

(In reply to comment #14)
> Should we not take oz.by then? Or can you lobby with them to fix it?

I don't think I could influence os.by.

> 
> In particular when the list is already rather long.
> 

Could I use the following list of engines for the moment?

Google
Yahoo
be.wikipedia.org
be-x-old.wikipedia.org
ru.wikipedia.org-be
tut.by
yandex.ru-be

Later we could include oz.by if we get permission.

Comment 16

[Mic Berman]

sure that's ok and perfect order

Comment 17

[Mic Berman]

Siarhei
going over one more time. do we have permission from tut.by?? if not i will contact them asap
i have permissions on others
mic

Comment 18

[Mic Berman]

please confirm the current RSS feed and RSS reader
are they the defaults i.e., feed = BBC reader=my yahoo, bloglines and igoogle
thanks
mic

Comment 19

[Mic Berman]

received permission for tut.by from Kirill Voloshin, CEO TUT.BY

Comment 20

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

I did a technical review on the changes that are part of the diff at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=287772&action=diff#be/browser/searchplugins/be-x-old.wikipedia.org.xml_sec1 ff. Based on that I'm marking this bug FIXED, yay.

I'm marking this a wanted1.8.1.x-, as we've shipped Belarusian, and we're not really doing changes in search engines on stable branches if not absolutely required. Setting target milestone to indicate that this is landed as part of M9, i.e., firefox 3 beta 1, pending QA for that.

Comment 21

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

Reference is http://hg.mozilla.org/users/axel_mozilla.com/l10n-src-verification/index.cgi/file/af0a05243294/reference/HEAD/be/, marking VERIFIED.