Perl for Web Site Management

Chapter 13. Running a CGI Search Tool

As a web site grows, offering full-text searching of its contents becomes increasingly important. It just isn’t possible (or desirable) to have a specific set of browseable links that will let every user find the content she is looking for.

SWISH (Simple Web Indexing System for Humans) is a freely available search tool, originally by Kevin Hughes, that has had a long history, featuring numerous incarnations. One of the current versions is SWISH-E, available from http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/SWISH-E/. This chapter demonstrates how to add keyword searching to a web site with SWISH-E and just a little bit of Perl CGI scripting.

The creation of this keyword-search capability will require a number of steps:

1. Downloading the SWISH-E software source code and documentation.

2. Uncompressing and expanding the downloaded SWISH-E source code and documentation.

3. Compiling the SWISH-E source code to make an executable version of the program.

4. Running the compiled SWISH-E program from the command line to create an index file.

5. Creating a Perl CGI script that can run the SWISH-E program to retrieve a set of results matching a set of search terms, then formatting and returning those results to the web user.

Downloading and Compiling SWISH-E

Within a few clicks of the SWISH-E home page is a downloads section where one can obtain the latest version of the software. At the time of this writing, that was ftp://sunsite.berkeley.edu/pub/swish-e/swish-efiles.1.3.2.tar.gz ...