The yolink module I maintain hasn't been getting along with Fusion themes, it seems. Both of them wanted to control search-result.tpl.php and search-block-form.tpl.php. My understanding is that the theme should win the fight and search results and forms should show as Fusion wants them to. That would be okay. But what actually happened was that no code from either of the two files showed up.
With a small number of (fake for testing purposes) users, the Fivestar Recommender module gives fewer results, and fewer wildly divergent results than the text-match-based Solr "More Like This" module. Hard to say how they'd compare with more users, more content, and more ratings, but I'll stick with Fivestar for now as I move forward with a planned recommendation project.
I've been checking out rating and recommendation systems in Drupal. The first recommendation system sneaked in with Apache Solr -- the "More Like This" module. Here's a screen shot of the recommendations it gave me on my most recent blog post. I tweaked it to show lots of results and use longer words to determine matching content, but aside from that, I haven't done much customization. The first two or three recommendations are great, but they break down pretty quickly after that.
If you care about search enough to get Apache Solr up and running, you should check out yolink, which shows searchers the paragraphs they're looking for under each search result link.
And after a little tweak to where the keyword lives in the search results URL, yolink layers seamlessly over Apache Solr results (only tested on Drupal 6 so far). If you care about helping your site visitors find information, please check it out.
The Sky theme was having a weird fight with my search results page, so I've skipped ahead to week 4 of Theme a Week: Seven. Need to configure columns at some point, but gonna test Solr first.
Okay, the post title colors were pure Garland, so I don't think I was really seeing the Seven theme. Tried BlogBuzz, but didn't have time to hack it to add search form. Tried Rubik, but there was pink screen. Tried AdaptiveTheme, more pink screen. How about Genesis...? Ah, Adaptive and Genesis need sub-themes set up. No time! No time!
In my ongoing quest to white-screen my blog, I'm throwing random themes at it and seeing what happens.
This week: the Sky theme. I like the gray default. If I were sticking with this long-term, I'd put some time into Article title, text, and image alignment. Also, the color settings, which are in theory easy to adjust, don't seem to be labeled.
I like The Pretty as much as the next person, but I'm happy to acknowledge that I'm not especially good at making it. This has the great benefit of keeping me out of seemingly upsetting design battles at work, and it means I can change my theme more often than my shoes and have little feeling about it besides interest and mild fear that I'm gonna get white-screened.
Installing yolink on a Drupal 7 site is the same as installing any other Drupal 7 module. As with Open Calais and several Acquia modules, though, you'll need to sign up for a yolink API key.
