How to create a Keyword Search Page

You must register to use our Keyword Search Engine. Contact our sales department for more information. The use of extended services from the Do-It-Yourself Web! server is a premium service that can be arranged in advance.

The Keyword Search tool uses SWISH as it's engine. There are a variety of Perl scripts that serve as the interface to this powerful and fast index system. This page explains how to set up an HTML form that will enable you or your readers to search your site by keyword. You can use boolean expressions to narrow your search (ie. and/or). Before you can search your site by keyword, you must configure your index. If you have already configured your index, but you have since added extra pages and you wish to add the new pages to your index with the same configuration you can re-index it at any time.

An example of a form and it's source are here to aid you.

Instructions

Required Statements

Your form must include the following statement:

<FORM METHOD="POST" ACTION="http://web.idirect.com/cgi-bin/search.pl">

The two absolutely required fields are the user field and the keywords field. They MUST come after the FORM statement above and should look like this (replace the user name with your login name). The keywords tag should appear exactly as it is displayed although you are free to change the value of SIZE="60" to any size you prefer.

<INPUT TYPE="hidden" NAME="user" VALUE="yourloginname">
<INPUT TYPE="text" NAME="keywords" VALUE="" SIZE="60">

Remember that UNIX is case sensitive...both the above statements contain strings that MUST be in the case displayed above. Be sure to close off your form with the tag when you have finished listing all your fields

Optional Fields

title

This form field allows you to specify the title and header that will appear on the resulting page.

Method

If you wanted a title of 'Our Search Form Results':
<INPUT TYPE="hidden" NAME="title" VALUE="Our Search Form Results">

return_link_url

This field allows you to specify a URL that will appear, as return_link_title, on the following report page. It is useful if you want to allow the user to receive the report on the following page, but want to offer them a way to get back to your main page.

Method

<INPUT TYPE="hidden" NAME="return_link_url" VALUE="http://web.idirect.com/~yourname/">

return_link_title

This is the title that will be used to link the user back to the page you specify with return_link_url. The two fields will be shown on the resulting form page as:

<ul>
<li><a href="return_link_url">return_link_title</a>
</ul>

Method

<INPUT TYPE="hidden" NAME="return_link_title" VALUE="Back to Main Page">
(Replace the VALUE tag content with whatever you like)

Changing the appearance of the default confirmation page

The following fields can be used to change the <BODY> tag of the default confirmation screen

background
bgcolor
text_color
link_color
vlink_color
alink_color

These fields will change the default values of the <BODY> tag from the default of <body bgcolor="#0b014b" background="http://www.idirect.com/graphics/bgcolor.jpg" text="#eeeeee" link="#00ff00" vlink="#ffff00" alink="#ff0000"> to whatever you specify.

Method

To use a file called image.gif in your root directory as the background:
<INPUT TYPE="hidden" NAME="background" VALUE="http://web.idirect.com/~yourname/image.gif">

For a background colour of white:
<INPUT TYPE="hidden" NAME="bgcolor" VALUE="#FFFFFF">

For a text colour of black:
<INPUT TYPE="hidden" NAME="text_color" VALUE="#000000">

For a link colour of red:
<INPUT TYPE="hidden" NAME="link_color" VALUE="#FF0000">

For a visited link colour of blue:
<INPUT TYPE="hidden" NAME="vlink_color" VALUE="#0000FF>

For a active visited link colour of yellow:
<INPUT TYPE="hidden" NAME="alink_color" VALUE="#FFFF00>