To set up searching of your web pages, you first have to run some programs on our server to index your pages. The indexer goes through all the html files in your web tree and makes an index of almost every single word on every single page ("noise" words, like 'the' and 'and' are excluded.) It stores it in a compact form in an index file, which you specify in your html page.

The index procedure looks just like this:

vms dcl mumbo jumbo

There's also a procedure to start the procedure. This may seem silly to you, but it simplifies things for us. What you need to do is copy some files from our demo area to your default directory. Log in interactively to your Opus One account, and issue the command (this should be all on one line)

$ COPY/LOG DISK$EBONY:[HTTPD.WWW.DEMO.SEARCH]*.* []

Now you're ready to start work. Send us some mail so we can enable searching on your web tree. Be sure to include your Opus One account name and some contact information. You will need to edit the files START-INDEX.COM and INDEX-SITE.COM to insert your own directories in file specifications. The comments in the procedures tell you exactly which lines to edit. Once you've edited both procedures, execute START-INDEX.COM with the command:

$ @START-INDEX.COM

If this seems to be working ok (if you do not get immediate error messages) then go work on your search page, using MYINDEX.HTML-SAMPLE as a starting point, for awhile. After a bit you should find some new files in your [.www] directory. the procedure creates two index files, called in our example MYINDEX.SEL and MYINDEX.IDX.

It's very important to realize that the name of the index files must match the name of the html file that calls it. If you decide to call your html file 'QUICK-SEARCH.HTML', then you'll need to edit INDEX-SITE.COM to change the name of the index files produced. The index files also MUST be in the same directory as the html file which calls it.

Once you've created your html file and your index files, you're all set. That's all you need to do. The searching is invoked by the ISINDEX tag, and it automatically puts up a box and a prompt. Whenever you change the html files in your web tree, you'll need to re-run START-INDEX.COM to reindex your web tree.

Last updated: 20 March 1996

trumbo@Opus1.COM