WWW-Talk Index

mkgray@athena.mit.edu
Thu, 19 Aug 93 09:04:56 EDT


A while ago I said I would do this, and I've finally gotten around to doing
an initial implementation.

<a href="http://opus.mit.edu:8001/talkindex">The index</a> is very simple
minded and will probably remain that way. The search string will search the
last 100 messages to www-talk and present them in a list. If you want to
search more or less than 100 messages, make the last space separated word
of your search the number of messages you want to search. That is:

sgml /* search last 100 transactions for 'sgml' */
sgml 50 /* search last 50 transactions for 'sgml' */

There is one problem with this index. It is slow. It's really slow.
Pretty much, there's nothing I can do about it because the software that I
built it on top of is where the slowness comes from. If I come up with a
better solution, I'll get to it.

Unfortunately, the index also gets bitten by the conversion of spaces to
'+'s. For example, a search of html+ will yeild the same as a search of
html because I just translate all +'s into spaces.

The opus.mit.edu location is temporary, so in the future, you will want to use
www.mit.edu:8001, but we are in the middle of moving services from one
one machine to another. Hopefully the switch over will take place in about
a week.

Any problems should be sent to webmaster@athena.mit.edu. Enjoy.

Matthew Gray
mkgray@athena.mit.edu
webmaster@athena.mit.edu