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Searching of indexes

Search operations can be denoted in an HTML document by an <ISINDEX> tag, which will cause the browser to display a query box and a prompt to indicate that the document is a searchable index. When the user fills in the box with a search term, it is sent to the server as a search string in the URL. Such a search string may also be encoded in the URL in a link.

The interpretation of a query string as a request to search an index is made either by the script that is invoked to process the request, or by the server configuration, if it is not processed by a separate script. The script may perform the search operation directly or it can use a specialized search engine to do so. There are a number of such programs available, the most well known on the Web probably being WAIS. A number of other search programs are listed in the Resource Guide. The GN server has various search facilities built-in, and an auxiliary program that incorporates a WAIS search engine can also be created (see Section ).

Spinning the Web by Andrew Ford
© 1995 International Thomson Publishing
© 2002 Andrew Ford and Ford & Mason Ltd
Note: this HTML document was generated in December 1994 directly from the LaTeX source files using LaTeX2HTML. It was formatted into our standard page layout using the Template Toolkit. The document is mainly of historical interest as obviously many of the sites mentioned have long since disappeared.