Overhauling the Search in Drupal 6

Your proposal sounds interesting... Can I offer a few suggestions and comments?

1) Proposals for changes to the core of Drupal, I've been told, do not work all that well for GSOC. This is mostly because changes to Drupal core go through a long process of reviews and revisions, and the time frame of GSOC is fixed. So it would probably be better if you proposed making a contributed module rather than updates to Drupal core. If you create a working contributed module, then it can later be evaluated for incorporation into Drupal core.

2) At this point, new features or major behavior changes are closed for both Drupal 7 and Drupal 6 core. They would only be considered for Drupal 8. So if you really want to work on Drupal core, you need to at least be working from the Drupal 7 code base, and not Drupal 6.

3) Your suggestion sounds like two separate proposals.

(a) Spelling suggestions -- see http://drupal.org/node/247482 (feature request issue that has been already moved into Drupal 8). This is an excellent idea that has been suggested multiple times, and it would make a good addition to Drupal. I would still suggest for GSOC that you would create it as a contributed module for Drupal 6 and/or 7 (preferably both), and then it could be evaluated for addition to Drupal core for Drupal 8. You might also want to verify that there is not already a spelling suggestions contributed module available... I haven't checked recently.

(b) Search by relevance... Drupal core search already has a mechanism for scoring search results by relevance. For node/content search, the relevance score is based on how many times the keywords appear, and what HTML tag the keywords are in, as well as node links, etc. The relevance scores are not displayed in the output as they are on the Sphider site in your link, but the core Search module definitely considers relevance. So, could you please explain in more detail what you propose to change?

4) You might want to join the Search group on groups.drupal.org, and edit your proposal so it appears in the Search group as well. You might be able to find a mentor there, since that's the group for people intersted in searching issues.