Search engine for home page

[Josh Huston]

>We'd like to offer a search engine for our library home page.
>Currently we've got about 500 links and a small amount
>of in-house full text. We'll want to use the search engine 
>with the Netscape Enterprise server software.
>
>I'd appreciate recommendations.  Many thanks,  -- Laura Cohen
>

You didn't mention what platform your web server is running off.  But here
what we did for our web server running on Linux 2.0 (UNIX platform):

We find that Swish indexing/search engine is the most efficient and easy to
set up and maintain than WAIS.  Swish take less than half of hard disk space
than WAIS database would take for the same amount of documents indexed.  For
further information, see: http://www.eit.com/software/swish/swish.html

Then you'll need a CGI application to process the search results produced by
Swish and return the results to the browser.  We find that wwwwais is a good
program and produces a good output.  If you're a fairly good C programmer,
you could make modifications to the code to your needs.  wwwwais can be
obtained at http://www.eit.com/software/wwwwais/

However, you'll need a GNU C compiler to compile those two packages to use
it on your web server.  I hope this info will help you to get started with
search capabilities for your web site.

Josh

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Josh Huston                             Internet: hust0011 at gold.tc.umn.edu
Jr. User Services Specialist                      hust0011 at itlabs.umn.edu
University of Minnesota Libraries                 root at zahav.lib.umn.edu
160 Wilson Library                      Phone:   (612) 625-4343
Minneapolis, MN 55455                   Fax:     (612) 625-3428