WebDude
I think there are lots of materials available for learning on the website. So am not sure what you have been unable to find...and then use
Tutorials are available from the support section - it that what you were referring to?
<http://www.witango.com/downloads/documentation.taf? vnav=downloads&page=tutorials>
In addition, you have free access to the developer's section, with links to documentation (manuals) (which are useful for how to set up sorts, etc), archives for this list (though I have to admit I haven't had much luck with the search when I'm looking for something) etc.
<http://www.witango.com/developer/devresources.thtml?vnav=developer>
Your best resource is really this group of people on the WitangoTalk list, who freely offer good advice and support like no other list I have participated on.
On Oct 19, 2004, at 1:07 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I am using the free version on a site that is non-profit. I cannot comment on the paid version of the program. I do know they are identical. The only option for support for non-licensed use is a forum they have set up. I haven't been there for a while, but last year when I needed some answers to some questions and issues I was having, it would typically take a week or two for a response. That is pretty slow!
Another thing that irked me is the fact that they used to have some template pages you could download which gave different examples on setting up returns, sorts and stuff like that. For some reason, they pulled those pages off their site but the links to them still remain. Not sure why this was done. Maybe they thought to many people were taking advantage of the free version and they needed more paying customers.
dunno
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
You are hearing that Witango is not a good tool for this task.
I spent a long time trying to build a search engine in Witango and finally gave up. I looked at Swish-e and tried installing the latest Perl and their program. I never got it to work on a Win2k server. Sorry, but the learning curve was too much for me in the time I had to get this together. I spent days on just the installation and configuration and finally gave up. (Sorry Bill, I know you love the program)
Understood. I had plenty of perl experience so configuring the spider wasn't a problem for me, but can see how someone else might have a problem with it. If you don't have your paths setup properly the learning curve can seem very steep.
I ended up using a program called Alkaline Search Engine which was very good for a novice like me. I had it up and running in about a half a day. Requirements for me was to have the ability to weight different aspects of the pages being indexed, control the URL list of what to crawl (how deep, by directory or URL), be able to control the time the robot crawls, the ability to set a threshhold of changed pages to crawl, the ability to return just one URL per site, sort by weight, date, alpha domain, highlite keywords, etc.
What was nice is no Perl and a html front end to watch crawls and stats. All I needed to learn was about 100 tags that are unique to their program.
A word of caution though, no support. They have a forum, but it sometimes takes weeks to get an answer.
Is this the product you're talking about? http://alkaline.vestris.com/
When you say there is no support, are you refering to someone who isn't a licensed (paying) user of the product. Or is the support only slow for those that aren't paying?
Just my 2 cents.
Hmmmm.... Looking at swish-e, it's clear that it's a more powerful approach, but...
If I want to keep life simple and have everything running from witango - even if I won't get all the swish-e bells and whistles, is there a better approach? Or am I hearing that witango isn't really a good tool for this task?
On 10/19/04 8:15 AM, "Bill Conlon" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Then, maybe spidering the forum content is the easiest way to do this. It will let you do free form searching. The cgi script included with swish-e will highlight found terms, and let the user apply various restrictions.
The other thing is you don't have to worry about a SQL injection attack.
On Tuesday, October 19, 2004, at 08:06 AM, Roland Dumas wrote:
It's a search function for a forum. Dynamic popups won't work here,
because
it's a search of subject and content, which would overwhelm a selection
menu.
My thoughts were like this:
User's Search string = first argument Search string parsed (by space and comma) and the articles tossed out. That leaves an array of words within the first argument. The first argument and the remaning substrings comprise all the OR conditions you want.
Option 1: Generate SQL from a <@ROWS> that just appends a series of OR statements to the SELECT command.(easiest to do, but least secure)
Option 2: Write a taf in XML, using the <@ROWS> to create a custom <Criteria> section in a temporary taf that is just the search action, and then call that action with a branch/return. (typos will crash tango server - venturing into deep unknown)
Option 3: Do a For loop for each of the substrings and glue all the resultsets together (slow and painful)
Then, when you've got the amalgamated found set of records with whole string or substrings, figure a way to bubble up to the top the whole strings or items of greater value.
On 10/19/04 7:13 AM, "Bill Conlon" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Full text indexing can be expensive if your application does a lot of inserts/updates into columns that are indexed, but things like the winery/varietal shouldn't be a problem if you want to get it out of the db.
If it's a problem for your users, then maybe you can build a selection
list from the available choices. Or maybe you need something akin
auto-complete: run a javascript keyboard event handler that populates
your input field based on the characters typed so far.
On Tuesday, October 19, 2004, at 06:59 AM, John McGowan wrote:
Don't some newer databases have full text indexing now. (I believe
>>>> MSSQL calls the feature "Full-Text Search")
Wouldn't the best solution be to use a database that supports that type of searching?
If this functionality isn't available to you in your DB then I would suggest you still use swish-e like Bill suggests...
1. create a "dummy site" that will have a unique page for every record in the table that you're looking for. www.mysite.com/dbindex/main.taf 2. when you hit main.taf it generates a link to each record in the table you care about www.mysite.com/dbindex/main.taf?id=xxxxx www.mysite.com/dbindex/main.taf?id=yyyyy www.mysite.com/dbindex/main.taf?id=zzzzzz
(if you're familiar with witango this should take you about 5 minutes
to accomplish)
3. Tell swish-e to index the site by hitting the initial main.taf url.
4. now when you want to do a full text search of the table, you call swish-e's searching functionality. it will return a list of the matching entries. www.mysite.com/dbindex/main.taf?id=aaaaa www.mysite.com/dbindex/main.taf?id=bbbbb
>>>> www.mysite.com/dbindex/main.taf?id=cccccc
5. Of course at this point you know that if you strip out the "www.mysite.com/dbindex/main.taf?id=" You will have the part of the url that you care about, the aaaaa,bbbbb,ccccc which should be in a ranked order, and now you can do with that information whatever you want.
6. Schedule the re running of step 3. at some interval that satisfies
your need for accuracy vs. performance.
Of course this all assumes you're doing this for 1 particular table.
However, if you had more than 1 table you could still do it all by
adding a little more code to your main.taf and some more logic to the
part that stripps the url to get the important part.
/John
Roland Dumas wrote:
But, we're talking about a search of a database.
On 10/18/04 5:59 PM, "Bill Conlon" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Roland,
You've heard this from me before on this list. Take a look at
swish-e.
You could use its built-in spider to index your site,
really a greatthe
built-in cgi-script to highlight your results. It's
Lafite (I know,piece of software.
Now if you take the swish-e approach, here's what I would do to solve this.
Dyanmically create metatags for the key parameters you want to search:
<meta name="vineyard" content="Chateau Lafite, Chateau, Lafite"> <meta name="varietal" content="Pinot Noir, Pinot, Noir"> etc.
Use witango to tokenize while creating the HTML pages for the various wines.
Then use swish-e's meta name search.
On Monday, October 18, 2004, at 05:39 PM, Roland Dumas wrote:
In search engines, when you submit a search string, the search
engine
first
tokenizes and then searches for each substring string separately
and
then
brings them together as your found set. So if I search for 1961
Chateau
Lafite, I'll get items with 1961, others with Chateau or Chateu
Lafite, and
on top will be the found records with 1961 Chateau
string. Thatif
you
put it in quotes, it forces it to find only the whole
_____________________________________________________________ _____part is easy)
They will also rank a find of the full set of terms above ones with one or two terms in the documents.
Questions:
What's the approach with witango that will enable the search of tokenized strings.
Any ideas on how to do a crude ranking, such that the full term comes up on top of the found set?
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