Search Page - FP2002

  • Thread starter Thread starter Mr B
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M

Mr B

How exactly does a Search Page work if I add one to my web using FP2002? I'm hosted in a Windows
Server with ASP, etc so I'm assuming it's all compatible. Does the search make an index of every
word on every page and just do it that way or does it just catalog certain things to search for?

I've never used it before but want to make sure it would work how I'd need it to.

I also don't use FP Navigation buttons so most pages show as not linked to anything because of a
custom menu and such in case that's a problem.

Thanks.
 
Since you're on Windows, FP will simply rely on the Indexing Services built
into Windows. Indexing Services use catalogs, which are simply collections
of word/file associations and is usually done so there is one catalog for
each web site. Search engines don't necessarily index every word on every
page as some words are useless (such as: and, of, in, there, etc.). Indexing
Services is actually rather a powerful tool in that it can also search Word
docs and (with a special filter from Adobe) even Acrobat PDF files. If
Indexing Services is available for you to use you can get a lot more power
by using ASP to code against it instead of FP. FP will still generate a
standard search result, but with ASP you can do a lot of extras and custom
formatting.

If Indexing Services has been turned off or the admin decides to make it
unavailable to users, FP will drop back to it's own WAIS search engine. The
WAIS engine is ok and does a decent job, essentially the rudimentary items
you expect without any extras. It also doesn't index every single word but
does get most of them.

Hope this helps,
Mark Fitzpatrick
Microsoft MVP - FrontPage
 
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