Sorry that I forgot to reply to this!

> Sorry for jumping in the conversation without reading the all the threads
> about the subject.

No problem at all :) It's great to have you on board.

>     I believe a single package _index_ containing everything would be a
>     boon
>     to the growth and vitality of the community.
>
> That is where I had the idea to use a search engine to do this "indexing" job.
> This would allow to index existing documentations, papers or codes without
> much change in the existing infrastructures.
>
> What I have in mind a specialized search index where only things scheme
> are indexed so that it can serve as a central point where schemers can go
> to look for scheme things.
>
> I believe it integrates well with the decentralized / distributed nature
> of scheme development.

> Like that idea. I think that a search engine is more general and covers more
> use cases. Also I believe a search engine is easier to setup.

> FWIW, I have implemented a search engine in scheme. It sure can
> be improved but the basics are there: indexing and querying.
>
> If people are willing to support that kind of effort and actually use
> it. I willsetup an instance and we will be able to start on gathering and indexing
> scheme links.

A Scheme-centric free-text search engine would almost certainly be useful.

I would personally like to try to parse documentation and metadata in a
structured way for richer/more accurate indexing. Documentation is
written by programmers in a fairly limited number of markup language
(there's a collection of many examples of real markup in the wiki:
<https://github.com/schemedoc/wiki/wiki/Implementation-documentation-samples>)
-- hence we have a reasonable chance of semantic parsing with reasonable
effort. And if it turns out to work well, we have more leverage to
convince the people writing that documentation to add or change any
markup that is difficult to parse.

Maybe it would be best to try both approaches in parallel -- free-text
indexing and semantic parsing. Especially if you already have the search
engine ready, why not give it a go :)