FishNet: Adding a Search Engine to Your FishNet Web Site <i>(Unix server accounts only)</i>

Monday: September 6, 2010

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Adding a Search Engine to Your FishNet Web Site (Unix server accounts only)

Adding a Search Engine to Your FishNet Web Site (Unix server accounts only)

FishNet provides site wide keyword indexes and searches for your domain name account via the WWWWAIS (pronounced w-w-w-waiz) and SWISH indexing system.

All Web hosting accounts, domain and non domain, automatically have the indexes installed when the account is set up. The indexes are updated nightly. It is only necessary to install a search interface on your Web site to allow people to search your Web site. A very simple sample search interface form is below.

The Search Form

You can of course dress up the page any way you want with background textures, etc. The names and content of the fields are important, so leave them as is. The size of the input field can be changed without problem.

&lt;head&gt;
&lt;title&gt;Search Form&gt;/title&gt;
&lt;/head&gt;
&lt;body&gt;
&lt;form method=post action="/cgi-bin/wwwwais"&gt;
&lt;input type=hidden name=conffile
value="/usr/local/etc/httpd/wais/wwwwais.DOMAIN"&gt;
Search for:
&lt;input name="keywords" size=20&gt;
&lt;input type=submit value=Search&gt;
&lt;/form&gt;
&lt;/body&gt;
&lt;/html&gt;

IMPORTANT: substitute the main name portion of your domain name into the bold DOMAIN field above. This is necessary and must be correct for the search to work correctly. For example, for FishNet's domain, fni.com, the value line would read:

value="/usr/local/etc/httpd/wais/wwwwais.fni"&gt;

Indexed Items

All files ending in .html or .htm.
Contents of all subdirectories except:
- etc
- bin
- lib
- demo
- admin
- trash
- testing
- construction
- confidential

If you need other directories excluded or other file types indexed, contact FishNet Support.

Optional Results Page Header and Footer

The search results pages are automatically generated by the search wwwwais search software. To help you present the search pages to fit the look and feel of your site, FishNet has slightly customized the search program to allow you to add Web page headers and footers to the search results pages. These header and footer files have fixed names and must exist in your root directory by the names below.

waishdr.html
waisftr.html

In the header you can put full <html>, <head>, <title>, <body> tags, etc. In the footer file you will want to include </body> and </html> tags at least, though you certainly are free to put in and address and other contact information.