[Xesam] Why is vendor.maxhits read-only?

[Anders Rune Jensen]

On Dec 17, 2007 6:56 PM, Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen
<mikkel.kamstrup at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 17/12/2007, Anders Rune Jensen <anders at iola.dk> wrote:
> > Hi
> >
> > I was wondering why vendor.maxhits is read-only? Beagle can natively
> > set this, so it would be really nice to be able to set this using
> > Xesam as well.
> >
> > Thanks
>
> No this does not make sense to be writable. Perhaps it is because the
> explanation is bad. Here's another try:
>
> vendor.maxhits is a hard implementation level on the maximum number of
> hits returnable. If you write a Lucene based indexer this will be your
> JVMs Integer.MAXINT other indexing frameworks might set other limits
> (or none).
>
> An example by the hand is a Google query. You can maximally retrieve
> 10.000 docs from a Google query - try it yourself (this has to do with
> the distributed nature of the Google search engine - it is hard to get
> rankings correct if you allow arbitrarily many docs to be fetched).
>
> The fucntionality you describe is also easily implemented on the
> client side. I did this in xesam-tools' xesam.ui.HitPagerModel for
> example..

Ok, maybe I misunderstand this completely but it isn't always easy to
get all the details from source in a jif (even if it's Python :-)).

So what you suggest is that the cap is set very high on the number of
results returned from the xesam backend and then you just disregard
what you don't need on the client side? Is this what you meant or am I
misunderstanding something?

I could really see the usefulness of a flag to tell the backend how
many results I'm interested it.

-- 
Anders Rune Jensen
http://people.iola.dk/anders/