heh heh, well I am very glad it was my mistake. I just failed to look
down far enough on the email!
On Oct 20, 2004, at 6:55 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
oops!!!
Tha was supposed to be a ;-) (wink)
If this was directed at me, I was referring to the Alkaline Search
Engine web site. I have had no problems with support from Witango or
this forum. In fact, I have been a member for at least a couple of
weeks now :-)
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...
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,
and then use
the
built-in cgi-script to highlight your results. It's
really a great
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
Lafite (I know,
if
you
put it in quotes, it forces it to find only the whole
string. That
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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