Idea for SoC propsal

[Matej Svejda]

I'm a student at the Technical University Munich and I've just
finished my first semester (computer science) and I'd like to
participate in Google's Summer of Code. I have moderate knowledge of
C++ and Qt (I've written a couple of really small programs,
http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php/Destick?content=47576 is one of
them). What I'd like to do is to combine three ideas from
http://techbase.kde.org/index.php?title=Projects/Summer_of_Code/2008/Ideas#KRunner:

Ranking results, abstracting runner management and using runners in Kickoff

First of all ranking results should just work. My goal would be that
what any (sane) user thought of when entering something should always
be in the top 3 results (given a runner exists for what the user
wants). Also the user should be able to tweak how KRunner ranks
results (something like a list of preferred runners).

Also I think KRunner should support 2 modes for searching:

       A "general query"-mode where you just type a keyword and KRunner
tries to guess what you meant (which is how KRunner works now). Each
result gets a ranking and the results are displayed...
               ... grouped (like Apple's spotlight) where the groups
are sorted by
some kind of combination of average rating per entry and the highest
rating for each group (maybe).
               ... with each item on it's own, exclusively sorted by rating.
       How the results are displayed should be switchable and KRunner should
just remember this setting.

       A "specified query"-mode where you specify which runner should be
used for searching and only results from this runner would be
displayed. Which runner is used could be either written or selected
from a select box. I'm thinking of something like dolphin's places
select box. Also this setting should be switchable (text and select
box mode) and KRunner should just remember it.

All this should be abstracted out of plasma and it should be really
trivial (trivial as in "just a few lines of code") to use this
functionality in different applications (kick-off, raptor, dolphin,
lancelot...).

I haven't looked into KRunner's cobase yet but I will do that soon.

What do you guys think about this?

Matej