
Beagle is an indexing sub-system and search aggregator built on top of
Lucene.Net.


FIRST, A WARNING
================

Beagle is very new, and is under heavy development.  It is buggy.

Very little effort has gone into optimizing anything yet, so certain
operations are slow and consume ridiculous amounts of memory.

Beagle uses an epiphany extension to track your web browsing and index all of
the (non-https://) web pages that you view.  If you don't like that sort of
thing, you can disable it by setting the BEAGLE_NO_WEB_INDEXING environment
variable.



WHAT CAN BEAGLE DO?
===================

Beagle can index and search:
 * Your files (or at least the ones we have a filter for)
 * Your e-mail (as long as you are using mboxes and Evolution 1.5)
 * Your web browsing (if the epiphany extension is installed
   in the right place)
 * Your Gaim IM logs

Beagle can also search:
 * Your addressbook (as long as you are using a very, very new
   version of evolution-data-server and have evolution-sharp 0.3 or better)
 * Google (if you have a Google Web API key from
   http://api.google.com/createkey and put that key in an environment
   variable named GOOGLE_WEB_API_KEY.)



HOW DO I INDEX MY DATA?
=======================

Files and e-mail are not yet indexed in "real time".  To update the
index (or create the index, if you are using Beagle for the first time)
run the 'beagle-update-index' script.

*WARNING* The first time you run beagle-update-index will probably take
a long time, particularly if you have a big home directory or lots of
e-mail.  Subsequent updates will be faster.

Because Beagle is still buggy and unstable, we don't recommend running
beagle-update-index as a cron job --- there is too much that can go wrong.

If you installed beagle into a different prefix that epiphany, epiphany
won't detect the extension.  Try creating a symbolic link from
BEAGLE_PREFIX/lib/epiphany/extensions/libbeagleextension.so to
EPIPHANY_PREFIX/lib/epiphany/extensions.

Also, the web indexing will only work if BEAGLE_PREFIX/bin is in your path.



HOW DO I SEARCH MY DATA?
========================

Beagle comes with two search tools.  Both are still very primitive.

There is a command-line tool called 'beagle-query'.  Just run:
 % beagle-query <thing to search for>
It's output is not particularly user-friendly.

There is also a graphical tool called 'best'.  It is a bit more user-friendly
that beagle-query.



BOY, THIS THING SUCKS.  HOW DO I FILE A BUG?
============================================

bugzilla.gnome.org, product 'beagle'.




KNOWN ISSUES
============

Google queries are currently broken due to a problem with Mono Beta 2.

The OpenOffice.org filter crashes on encrypted files.

The HTML filter doesn't know how to handle the windows-1252 encoding.

Sometimes bad things happen with Lucene's locking, leaving the index
inaccessible.  If anyone figures out how to reliably reproduce this problem,
please contact trow@ximian.com.



FRIENDS OF BEAGLE
=================

Thanks to:
Doug Cutting for Lucene, which continues to blow my mind.
Pasha Bizhan for Lucene.Net.
Simon Mourier for the Html Agility Pack.
Mariano Cano Pérez for his gnome-vfs bindings.
Kevin Godby for his work on the renderers.
