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:

 
<form method="post" action="/cgi-bin/htsearch">
<input type="text" name="words" size="15">
<input type="submit" value="Begin Search">
</form> 



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.

 
<form method="post" action="/cgi-bin/htsearch"> 
... 
</form> 



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
sort	sorting method for result set

Controlled Behavior

Here's an example:

 
<form method="post" action="/cgi-bin/htsearch">
<input type="text" name="words" size="15">
<input type="hidden" name="format" value="builtin-long">
<input type="hidden" name="matchesperpage" value="25">
<input type="hidden" name="method" value="and">
<input type="hidden" name="sort" value="score">
<input type="submit" value="Begin Search">
</form> 



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).