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 didn't keep up with new releases, so people were searching the outdated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.
