Re: Indexing in WebSTAR

[Arlen -dot- P -dot- Walker -at- JCI -dot- COM]

      I'm looking for an application to index the html documents served up
      on our WebSTAR operating system.  Ideally, it would not require that I
      go through and tag everything as an index (!), and would allow users
      to search the site by keyword or concept and return a list of
      documents to them containing the search terms.  I've found scads for
      OS, Unix and Win NT systems - but nothing yet for our great and simple
      Mac.

      Any recommendations?

There's a real basic one, called Apple e.g. available free from Apple. It's
based on Apple's V-Twin search engine. Performance is quite fast, and I'm
only running it on a Centris 650. There are some commercial products as
well, based on it, which offer more features (alas, I've forgotten their
names). It'll rebuild indexes in the background, at a specific time
(midnight is default) to catch up with files you add to the server.

It doesn't allow Boolean operations (instead it uses an implied "or" to
search for all terms given) but it returns a "relevance ranking" for each
file it finds.

    http://www.cybertech.apple.com/Appleeg.html

There's a mailing list as well for it: listserv -at- cybertech -dot- apple -dot- com and
"subscribe egg-list yourname" in the body. Apple e.g. is late beta at the
moment, and has been reliable for me.

In addition, there's something called WarpSearch CGI which will search text
files without indexing. I used to see something called TR-WWW around as
well, but it seems to have vanished.

And, if you're not afraid of a little programming, Dave Winer's Frontier can do
almost anything you need.

    http://www.scripting.com

Have fun,
Arlen
Chief Managing Director In Charge, Department of Redundancy Department
DNRC 224

Arlen -dot- P -dot- Walker -at- JCI -dot- Com
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