Re: search engine for the Guide (was Re: Why does $r-print()...)

2000-05-04 Thread Stas Bekman

On Wed, 3 May 2000, Matt Sergeant wrote:

 On Wed, 3 May 2000, Stas Bekman wrote:
 
  Yeah, I've been thinking about it. There was one site that has offered me
  to provide a good search engine and they did, but the problem is that they
  didn't keep up with new releases, so people were searching the outdated
  version, which is quite bad -- I've removed the reference to it, after
  asking them to update their copy for a few months, with no results.
 
 Can't we use WWW::Search - If I recall correctly some of the sites can be
 restricted to a domain, so you could build a search interface pretty
 easily.

DESCRIPTION :
This class is the parent for all access methods supported by the
WWW::Search library. This library implements a Perl API to web-based
search engines.

It's not the search engine -- it's a Perl API to the search engines. We
need a search engine not the API to it. Did I miss something?

__
Stas Bekman | JAm_pH--Just Another mod_perl Hacker
http://stason.org/  | mod_perl Guide  http://perl.apache.org/guide 
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]  | http://perl.orghttp://stason.org/TULARC/
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--




Re: search engine for the Guide (was Re: Why does $r-print()...)

2000-05-04 Thread Matt Sergeant

On Thu, 4 May 2000, Stas Bekman wrote:

 On Wed, 3 May 2000, Matt Sergeant wrote:
 
  On Wed, 3 May 2000, Stas Bekman wrote:
  
   Yeah, I've been thinking about it. There was one site that has offered me
   to provide a good search engine and they did, but the problem is that they
   didn't keep up with new releases, so people were searching the outdated
   version, which is quite bad -- I've removed the reference to it, after
   asking them to update their copy for a few months, with no results.
  
  Can't we use WWW::Search - If I recall correctly some of the sites can be
  restricted to a domain, so you could build a search interface pretty
  easily.
 
 DESCRIPTION :
 This class is the parent for all access methods supported by the
 WWW::Search library. This library implements a Perl API to web-based
 search engines.
 
 It's not the search engine -- it's a Perl API to the search engines. We
 need a search engine not the API to it. Did I miss something?

Yes. On some of the search engines (AltaVista springs to mind) you can
search for things on particular web sites, or even links to particular web
sites. So as long as AltaVista keeps its search contents up to date, you
can leverage their engine. IIRC either Randall or Lincoln did a
WebTechniques article about this a few months ago.

-- 
Matt/

Fastnet Software Ltd. High Performance Web Specialists
Providing mod_perl, XML, Sybase and Oracle solutions
Email for training and consultancy availability.
http://sergeant.org http://xml.sergeant.org




Re: search engine for the Guide (was Re: Why does $r-print()...)

2000-05-04 Thread Rick Myers

On May 04, 2000 at 10:37:05 +0100, Matt Sergeant twiddled the keys to say:
 On Thu, 4 May 2000, Stas Bekman wrote:
 
  On Wed, 3 May 2000, Matt Sergeant wrote:
  
   On Wed, 3 May 2000, Stas Bekman wrote:
   
Yeah, I've been thinking about it. There was one site that has offered me
to provide a good search engine and they did, but the problem is that they
didn't keep up with new releases, so people were searching the outdated
version, which is quite bad -- I've removed the reference to it, after
asking them to update their copy for a few months, with no results.
   
   Can't we use WWW::Search - If I recall correctly some of the sites can be
   restricted to a domain, so you could build a search interface pretty
   easily.
  
  DESCRIPTION :
  This class is the parent for all access methods supported by the
  WWW::Search library. This library implements a Perl API to web-based
  search engines.
  
  It's not the search engine -- it's a Perl API to the search engines. We
  need a search engine not the API to it. Did I miss something?
 
 Yes. On some of the search engines (AltaVista springs to mind) you can
 search for things on particular web sites, or even links to particular web
 sites. So as long as AltaVista keeps its search contents up to date, you
 can leverage their engine. IIRC either Randall or Lincoln did a
 WebTechniques article about this a few months ago.

Leveraging the existing engines is a good idea, if you have fairly
static content. If you're a moving target though, I'm of the opinion
that it would be better to have an "in-house" engine.

The existing engines are "nice" and don't invade your site too
intrusively, so you end up with references which tend to lag current
content. How to deal with that is not something I've thought about.

The one time I tried an engine I ended up with a forking agrep, which
comes as part of the Glimpse package. Glimpse itself sucks (in my
opinion), but agrep works pretty good. The problem with it is you have
to fork, which of course sucks.

Oh well. My .02 :)

Rick Myers[EMAIL PROTECTED]

The Feynman Problem   1) Write down the problem.
Solving Algorithm 2) Think real hard.
  3) Write down the answer.