Search

Search

Figure 4: Example flowchart of RegEx search function for both users and chat log

User search: As the user count on a network will average around 100 and is relatively static, we will simply perform these searches using RegEx. RegEx will return a list of terms that match the search. Typos will not be supported by RegEx, but this should not be too problematic in the case of searching for users.

Chat log search: We would also use RegEx to search among chat logs, but we would also want to have more capability in sorting our results as the amount of logs stored may get very large after several years. One option we would like for sorting search results is by recency, so that users can choose to see the most recent search results first. This would be a relatively straightforward implementation, simply sorting by the timestamps of the search results. Alternatively, we might like the user to be able to sort by relevance. One metric of relevance we would sort by is if the user searched several words, how many of those words are present in the chat log. In order to sort by relevance, we would want to assign each search result a relevance score in order to sort them. While recency is in most cases the more useful search metric and sorting by relevance is very complicated, we will likely not implement sorting by relevance in early stages of development.