The Searchable Site

which will show a number of lines something like:

nobody     873  0.1  0.5 16492 11416 ?
   S    18:03   0:00 /usr/local/apache2/bin/httpd
nobody     874  0.0  0.5 16492 11416 ?
   S    18:03   0:00 /usr/local/apache2/bin/httpd
nobody     875  0.0  0.5 16552 11620 ?
   S    18:03   0:00 /usr/local/apache2/bin/httpd

The first column is the user name the Web server is running as—in this case nobody. Now you can answer the prompt when wginstall asks, and if you are running wginstall as a user that is capable of changing ownership, it sets the ownership for you. If not, become root after the install is complete and change ownership manually. Supposing you installed to the default location of /usr/local/wg2, you would run:

chown -R nobody /usr/local/wg2/archives

to make the archives directory Web-writable.

Once the install is complete, it is time to choose the files you want to index and create the search form. Webglimpse calls this Configuring an Archive.

Upon completing the install, you will see something like the following:

********************************
Done with install! You may use
 http://mycoolserver.com/cgi-bin/wg2/wgarcmin.cgi

or:

/usr/local/bin/wgcmd
to configure archives at any time.
(The web version currently has more features)

Run wgcmd to create new archive now? [Y]:

Once you are familiar with Webglimpse, the command-line tool is very handy for managing multiple archives or quickly setting up new ones. Your first time, I'd recommend using the Web version. So you enter N to not run wgcmd, and instead open the wgarcmin.cgi URL in your browser, and enter the user name and password you chose during the install. This brings you to the archive manager, which will later list all the archives you have configured. If this is your first time installing, the list is empty, so press Add New Archive. Now you should see the New Archive screen shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. The New Archive screen allows you to enter a title and description, choose a category and select the language in which the search results should be presented.

Here you can enter a title and description, and optionally select a category and language. The language doesn't restrict the sites you can include, but it does select a template and character set for the search form and results page. Then you will click on one of the buttons at the bottom:

After entering the specific directory or URL to index and entering settings, such as maximum number of pages, you will come to the main control screen for managing an archive. Here you can add additional sources of pages to index, so that one archive can combine local files, remote sites and trees of remote pages on multiple sites if so desired. Figure 2 shows the archive ready to go. Once you press the Build Index button, the spider goes out and gathers remote pages, filters out the HTML tags, and then runs glimpseindex to create a block-level inverted index for fast searching.

Figure 2. The Manage Archive page lets you combine Web pages from different sources into one searchable index.

Finally, you can get a search form to include in your pages by clicking on the text link Add a search box or page to your website. This link takes you to a page with the source code for three example search forms for this archive, ranging from a bare input box to an advanced search form supporting regular expressions and making all the options visible to the user. The simple version of the search form, supporting all, any or exact phrase searching, is shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3. The search templates that come with Webglimpse can be modified to fit your Web site. Only the form action and the names of the input tags need to be preserved.

You also can get the same forms by pressing the Search this Archive button or entering the URL directly to the Webglimpse cgi (http://mycoolserver.com/cgi-bin/wg2/webglimpse.cgi?ID=2). Normally they are generated in the language of the archive, but we're showing them in English here.