HTMLWAIS - A Wais based search engine.

Swinburne University


HTMLWAIS is a search engine designed primarily to enable local server searches of its HTML archive. It takes a WAIS question and runs waisq on a wais source that contains a document archive. The 'hit' files are treated as HTML files and are scanned for their title and their main headings. These are used to build a reply in HTML format with a the title providing a hypertext link to the document and the headings providing an abstract.

Current Version is 0.91 Aug-95

New with Version 0.91 is the option of including an additional link for files that are listed in the results. By creating a file by the name of "hw_remarks.html" in selected directories. Any file that matches a search in that directory will automaticly pick up a link to hw_remarks.html. The title of this file will be shown as the link text. It is intended to be used as a pointer to some additional general information that may help in explaining the current contents of the directory.

To Install

Firstly, you will need to have WAIS installed which will enable you to create a Wais-source and also provides the 'waisq' program that is used by HTMLWAIS. A sample Makefile to create a WAIS source is included with HTMLWAIS.

Edit the 'conf.h' file and set the pathnames to reflect your local setup.

Run 'make'

The sample form 'hwform.html' provides a simple interface to HTMLWAIS and the files hw_header.html and hw_trailer.html contain the header and trailer sections of a search reply.

To Use

You simply design a FORM with a search field and use a FORM line like:

<FORM METHOD=POST ACTION="/cgi-bin/htmlwais?Wais-Source.src">

Where "Wais-Source.src" is the database of the HTML archive. This will have to be created by the local sysadmin. The location of "htmlwais" may vary depending where it is installed, but usually in "cgi-bin".

Here is the source of a complete sample form or you can see this form in action.

HTMLWAIS is available via anon ftp from Swinburne University.


Last Updated: 28-Jun-95

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