meta-search/searching multiple repositories - request for volunteers/advice

[Sumana Harihareswara]

As sources of different kinds of information and conversation, we have
chat.zulip.org, the Google Groups/mailing lists, GitHub issues and pull
requests, git history, the blog, @zuliposs, and probably a couple other
places I haven't thought about. One can create a custom Google search
that specifically searches multiple specific websites -- the MediaWiki
community implemented a Google custom search box for similar reasons
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_technical_search and I think it
would be useful to our community to do a similar thing. This would
especially help me find stuff that happened in chat.zulip.org
discussions in public streams I'm not (yet) subscribed to, and would
help new interns and volunteers get up to speed faster.

But: Tim Abbott has noted that "the current search security model is
that you can view and search individual streams before you joined, but
not the entire realm's public content from before you joined.... to some
extent this is because it's actually technically quite difficult to
support".

*Two* places to search is better than "far more than two" so maybe we
could set up a custom search for everything but chat.zulip.org?

Relatedly: if anyone's unsatisfied with GitHub's "within this
organization" search of our repositories, maybe we could set up an
instance of dxr like Mozilla has: https://dxr.mozilla.org/ Our
installation could also include other repositories we care about, like
important upstream dependencies (e.g., Django, mypy) or client libraries
and integrations that aren't in our GitHub org.

What do folks think of this idea, and is anyone interested in
implementing it?

(chat.zulip.org version of this conversation:
https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/stream/general/subject/a.20multisite.20search.20for.20this.20community
)
--
Sumana Harihareswara