Local search engines summary

[Pam Day]

The following is a summary of the responses to my query on local search
engines.  Thank you to everyone who responded to my question.  We may try one
of the free search engines such as SWISH.

Excite has a product that you can place on your server to index and search your
site.  I have installed in on IBM RS6000 machines running apache for several
sites.  I am about to install it on NT next week.
Wayne Cease
wayne at webware-inc.com
http://webware-inc.com/

You might check out the htDig search engine, from sdsu, found at
http://htdig.sdsu.edu/htdig.html
Joseph Woodard
jhwood1 at PacBell.COM  jhwoodar at well.com  jwoodard at igc.apc.org

I'd recommend you look into two FREE local search engine options:
1. swish combined with wwwwais <http://www.eit.com/>
2. excite from <http://www.excite.com/>
Sean Dreilinger
http://www.kensho.com/sean/pubring.htm
  sean at kensho.com

Check out SWISH which works with WWWWais as the gateway program.
Both are very easy to set up and use.  However searching options
are very simple/limited.  One of the reasons I liked these tools
when I used them almost 2 years ago (and decided to re-use them
at my library now) is because of the excellent documentation.
Walks you through everything.  If you don't plan on having an
elaborate website or search engine, swish and wwwwais are
excellent choices.  You need both - swish indexes the documents
on your site, and wwwwais transforms it to html output.
You can get documentation and the software downloaded from
http://www.eit.com/.  EIT's web has examples of how the search
engine works.  Also, feel free to check out our experimental use at:
http://www.rancho.cc.ca.us/home/dquinn/home.html
Anita

I use Excite to do this. I linked to the Excite site
and downloaded the software. I think they have a "for
pay" and a free version. I use the free version -
I run Netscape Commerce Server on Solaris 2.5
I have used it on NCSA HTTPd with Solaris 2.4
Beth Nicol -Automation Manager
mailto:bnicol at lib.auburn.edu

Our Web server is a Mac, and we use Phantom from Maxum
(http://www.maxum.com/Phantom/).  They offer an educational discount
price (under $300).
You can use this software to index your own site, or any other
site/combination of sites.  It's a regular web-crawling robot, so you
can use it to create searchable indexes of any other site on the web as
you choose.
If your regular web server is not a Mac, just run Phantom on a separate
Mac (better have at least 16-24 MB RAM) and point your "Search our site"
links to the other machine.  Phantom can generate HTML pages on the fly,
links to the other machine.  Phantom can generate HTML pages on the fly,
so you don't have to store any pages on the Phantom system: Phantom will
create the search-form page and results page as needed, or you can
create custom ones.  Check out Cal State Fullerton Library's
implementation at http://wwwlibrary.fullerton.edu/search.htm.
Roger
mailto:rharrison at fullerton.edu
http://wwwlibrary.fullerton.edu/people/rharrison/


--
Pam Day                                             pamday at rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu
Internet Reference Services Librarian
Milner Library
Campus Box 8900
Illinois State University
Normal, IL  61790-8900