How can I make my web site searchable by the user?
Both free and commercial tools are available for this task.
A brief list of such tools follows. Thanks to
John K. Hinsdale for contributing the original list.
Free Web Site Search Engines
- freeWAIS-sf
- The well-known freeWAIS-sf engine offers an HTTP front end,
sf-gate, with which users can explore indexed documents on
your site. <URL:http://ls6-www.informatik.uni-dortmund.de/freeWAIS-sf/freeWAIS-sf.html>
- glimpse
- From the University of Arizona, the glimpse engine can be used
to easily search large numbers of HTML documents.
<URL:http://glimpse.cs.arizona.edu:1994/index.html>
- Harvest
- Harvest, from the University of Colorado, is a powerful
but somewhat complex information search and replication
system. Used properly, Harvest can be a powerful tool
to distribute your documents. <URL:http://harvest.cs.colorado.edu>
Commercial Search Engines (Some Available Free)
- Excerpt
- From Alma Mater Software. An off-the-shelf indexer for SunOS machines.
Includes web-based forms. <URL:http://www.alma.com/>
- Excite
- From ArchiText, Excite is expressly designed
to add straightforward searching capabilities
to existing web sites. <URL:http://www.excite.com/navigate>
- Topic
- From Verity, Inc. Topic indexes documents in a high-level
fashion by "concept." <URL:http://www.verity.com/>
- WAIS
- From America Online, WAIS is a modern commercial verison of
the original WAIS system, one of the first indexing systems
of this type. <URL:http://www.wais.com/>
World Wide Web FAQ