697028 - [eu] Add people search functionality for Basque

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Mozilla Localizations :: eu / Basque, defect)

Description

[Julen Ruiz Aizpuru]

Twitter has now been added to the list of search plugins for the en-US Firefox.
But Twitter doesn't speak Basque and doesn't know how to differentiate tweets written in the Basque language.

A local company, named CodeSyntax, developed a web application on top of the Twitter API that retrieves all the tweets written in Basque. So with a simple search you can find lots of *people* from the Basque-speaking community.

The app is called Umap and you can find it at http://eu.umap.eu (that's the Basque version, but there are Catalan and Welsh versions too)

I think this is a better choice than Twitter for the people search functionality, but I'd like to know if you are OK with this before contacting the site owners or submitting any patches.

Comment 1

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

Interesting service. I like the site overall, in particular that it shows the default twitter results in parallel to the basque subset.

But the search is rather brittle, I think. There are no original twitter results if the search doesn't find stuff in the basque subset.

Also, I searched for persons with first and last name, as well as hashtags or @people. Despite there being results in broader searches for those, the search for those in particular failed. Say, http://eu.umap.eu/?word_slug=%23Zubia&x=0&y=0 errors badly.

Comment 2

[Julen Ruiz Aizpuru]

(In reply to Axel Hecht [:Pike] from comment #1)
> Interesting service. I like the site overall, in particular that it shows
> the default twitter results in parallel to the basque subset.
> 
> But the search is rather brittle, I think. There are no original twitter
> results if the search doesn't find stuff in the basque subset.

I think that's by design: it aggregates Basque users and automatically selects texts that are written in Basque. So there's a little bit of NLP behind the scenes.

> Also, I searched for persons with first and last name, as well as hashtags
> or @people. Despite there being results in broader searches for those, the
> search for those in particular failed. Say,
> http://eu.umap.eu/?word_slug=%23Zubia&x=0&y=0 errors badly.

AFAIK you just search for the hashtags without the # sign.

User search is done in the following URL: http://eu.umap.eu/u/{username}
I see it only searches for screen names, no real names. I ignore the implementation details, but I don't think that would be difficult to add.

Maybe I can point the persons responsible for the site to this bug so they can add more information or solve any doubts you could have. I'm sure they're interested on getting into the Basque version of Firefox, and perhaps, if it's worth the effort, they could make any proposed changes in order to ship as a search engine for people.

Comment 3

[Julen Ruiz Aizpuru]

Closing as obsolete.