From: Jason Voegele <voegele.6@osu.edu>
Subject: RE: (urth) Call 4 a FAQulty
Date: Thu, 28 Jan 1999 12:29:19 

I'm a programmer, but I don't think it takes any programming skill 
whatsoever if you use some of the search forms provided by standard search 
engines.  HotBot, for example, provides a search form that you can embed 
within your Web page, and all you have to do is provide the domain through 
which it is supposed to search.  This would require a domain name 
specifically for the faq (such as www.wolfe-faq.com), so it may not be 
flexible enough.  It's worth looking into, though, and if it's not enough 
feel free to contact me and I'll see what I can put together for searching 
only those pages relating directly to the Wolfe FAQ.

Jason Voegele

-----Original Message-----
From:	Michael Straight [SMTP:straight@email.unc.edu]
Sent:	Thursday, January 28, 1999 11:33 AM
To:	urth@lists.best.com
Subject:	Re: (urth) Call 4 a FAQulty

On Wed, 27 Jan 1999, William H. Ansley wrote:

> I am not sure about the "less work" part; the archives are easily
> searchable as plain text (I have downloaded all of them except the most
> recent to my computer in this form) but because of inconsistencies in
> references (different abbreviations, referring to a character by a 
nickname
> or by a humorously altered form of the name, simple typos, etc.) as well 
as
> the shear bulk of the material over several different files, it is
> difficult to find specific information.

Still, I think it would be a big improvement if either:

1.  Someone with programing knowledge would help attach a search engine to
the archives (I have no idea how big a job that would be), or

2.  Each archive were available as a single large text file one could
search online with one's browser.

When I mentioned option #2 to Ranjit, it sounded like limited server space
at his site was the main obstacle.

As it is, I am regularly unable to find conversations in the archives when
I go back to try to find something someone wrote, largely because it takes
so long to search each of the archive volumes individually.

-Rostrum


works
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ranjit@best.com
whorl@lists.best.com


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