Want to add a search engine to your Web site but don't know how? Well, today's your lucky day! In this tutorial, find out how to obtain, install and use the popular ht://Dig indexing engine to add powerful, effective search capabilities to your site with minimal time and fuss.
ht://Dig allows you to customize both the search form, and the result page generated from a query. In order to demonstrate, I'll create a plain-vanilla search form, called "search.html", which looks like this:
There are a couple of important things to note here. The first is the ACTION attribute of the <FORM> element, which must point to the "htsearch" utility located in the Web server's CGI directory - you'll remember that this location was specified when configuring the software.
The second is the search box itself - note that this element must be named "words", so that the "htsearch" utility knows to use the data within it as the search string.
<input type="text" name="words" size="15">
A number of other variables may also be set in this form to control the behavior of "htsearch" - here's a brief list:
VARIABLE
WHAT IT MEANS
config
sets the name of the configuration file to use
matchesperpage
sets number of records per result page
method
sets type of search (any word, all words, Boolean)
exclude
if set, excludes URLs matching this pattern from the result set
restrict
if set, includes only those URLs matching this pattern in the result set
More information on what these variables mean can be found in the ht://Dig documentation, at http://www.htdig.org/. For a working example, refer to the sample form installed by the software (as discussed on the previous page).
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