Adding Search Facilities to Your Web

Abstract: This document provides a short introduction to some of the ways to add a search facility to your web.

• Introduction
• Commercial Search Engines
• Local search engines
• Other options

Introduction

As you develop a sufficiently large course web, you'll need to provide a variety of ways for readers to navigate your web. One facility that many readers find useful is a simple search facility, so that they can quickly find pages without having to follow a number of links or understand the structure of your site.

For example,

• A student looking for pages corresponding to a particular topic might search for that topic.
• A student looking for your office hours might search for "office hours".
• A student trying to determine the date of the final exam might search for "exam" or "final".

Commercial Search Engines

The easiest way to add a search facility to your site is to register with one of the commercial search engines, such as Altavista (http://www.altavista.digital.com). Most have a register button that lets you enter the URL of your page.

The primary advantage of using one of the standard search facilities is that it makes your page available to a wide variety of users. At the same time, it means that students need to do more focused searches to ensure that they are limited to your web. Fortunately, most web browsers permit you to limit a search to a particular site. For example, in Altavista, you would use

+search term +url:site-info

The plus signs indicate that the term must be matched. The url limits the search to pages with a particular URL. For example, to search my pages at Dartmouth for information about HTML, you would use

+html +url:www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~samr/

Local search engines

It is also possible to add a search engine directly to your site. This may require you to install new software and to learn about complex issues, such as CGI scripts. However, a local search engine may permit faster and more accurate searches.

I would suggest waiting until you're more experienced before adding your own search engine (and, if possible, have your webmaster do it).

I've written a simple search engine in Perl (for Unix machines) that I'm happy to send to you. Send me email if you're interested.

Other options

Some site development utilities, such as ASML, automatically develop a search facility for any site they build. You can find more information on ASML at URL http://devlab.dartmouth.edu/asml/.

This page written by Samuel A. Rebelsky.

This page generated on 47 by SamR's Site Suite.