A quick followup to Geoff's message about the importance
of excluding terms that are frequently (or, commonly) used.

Our institution excludes nearly 400 words from the search
because they lose significance due to their frequent usage.
In addition to words frequently used in the United States,
we also exclude words that are in frequent use locally and
in our institution.  For example, we exclude the word 'box'
because almost every one of our pages offers a postal box
to which surfers can write for additional information (same
applies to the words 'phone' and 'telephone').  When users
go to our search page, they are advised that we maintain a
list of non-searchable terms (we even provide a link to the
list).  When a user's search returns no match, we also tell
them about the list of non-searchable terms and provide a
link to the list.  Our implementation of htdig can be seen at
"http://www.louisiana.edu/Web/Search/".

Regards,

-- Duke Hillard, Webmaster, UL Lafayette


Geoff Hutchison wrote:

> At 12:03 AM -0400 10/28/00, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> >If I search on "V8" I get no results. If I search on "V8SHO" (a type of
> >V8 engine in a Ford Taurus SHO) then I get results, even though there are
> >clear examples of "V8" on those same pages.
>
> Well for "V8" you'd need to set the minimum word length:
>
> <http://www.htdig.org/attrs.html#minimum_word_length>
>
> --
> -Geoff Hutchison
> Williams Students Online
> http://wso.williams.edu/
>
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