Simple search API proposal, take 2

[Jean-Francois Dockes]

Magnus Bergman writes:
 > On Thu, 11 Jan 2007 11:48:26 +0100
 > "Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen" <mikkel.kamstrup at gmail.com> wrote:
 > > The only solution I see to this is to add a separate GetSnippets
 > > method and move requested properties into the Query method. This would
 > > give an api like:
 > 
 > I have thought a bit about this and I wonder, what is the actual
 > use-case when getting snippets separately is important? In the simple
 > use-cases I can think of you either display the snippets together with
 > the other properties or you don't display them at all. So if you want to
 > show just a few snippets to begin with, you probably just want to get
 > the properties for those few items also. Or am I wrong?

Sometimes you want to retrieve more hits than you will display at first.

One case is custom sorting or filtering by the application. You may want to
retrieve the, ie, 200 hits of highest relevance, then sort or filter them
by whizzbangfactor, and only retrieve the (expensive) snippets when the
user pages through the results. So you can display the first page at a
price of 10 snippets, not 200.

jf