From: Richard D. Piccard [piccard@ohio.edu]
Sent: Friday, September 29, 2000 2:31 PM
To: Info-VAX@Mvb.Saic.Com
Subject: Enhanced Versions of VMSINDEX and LYNX


We use LYNX and VMSINDEX to provide our keyword search capability.  As
the number of pages indexed has grown to more than 80,000, we have
decided it was worth the effort to modify those two packages to provide
better performance and additional features.

For the full story, and access to the software, see


     http://ouvaxa.cats.ohiou.edu/lynx/

and

     http://ouvaxa.cats.ohiou.edu/vmsindex/


The latter site includes a first stab at a "cookbook" for using
VMSINDEX.  The changes outlined below have been tested only for Compaq C
V6.2-008 on OpenVMS Alpha V7.2-1, using DIGITAL TCP/IP Services for
OpenVMS Alpha Version V5.0A, and using the OSU DECthreads server,
Version 3.4.  They have been used regularly for some time now; you can
take a look at our implementation at

     http://www.ohiou.edu/cwis/keyword/

(using either of the "Find a Web Page" sections).

I do intend to submit this work to Stephen Hoffman for the VMS Freeware
CD, but I would prefer to have the results of other people's testing
first.


LYNX:

-  The META-tagged keywords and description are now included.

-  A DCL symbol controls the number of subdirectories that LYNX uses for
the
   LNKnnnnnnnn.DAT files, to avoid the performance penalty for large
sites.

-  The crawling process does not pause waiting for a password.


VMSINDEX:

-  Home pages and pages with fewer slashes in the URL get elevated
ranking.

-  Pages with the searched-for words sooner in the page get elevated
ranking.

-  The ranking of pages on a particular server can be lowered.

-  The ranking of pages with a particular path can be lowered.

-  The reported hits can be restricted to ones whose URL contains a
string.

-  Site-specific customization of the output HTML uses INCLUDEd files.

-  Can be used with Macintosh Internet Explorer V5 (no links work if
ISINDEX).


                                            RDP

=========================================================
Dick Piccard                       Academic Technology Manager
piccard@ohio.edu                             Computer Services
http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~piccard/            Ohio University
(740) 593-1017                                Athens, OH 45701