Searching www.dmcnews.com

["Dave Swingle" <dswingle@xxxx>]

There has been some discussion recently about the difficulty of searching
our now-huge DMCNEWS archive and tech section. The current search engine is
the default MS Front-page search utility, which is somewhat arcane to use
and not very well-featured. The alternative texix/lexis search is better but
takes a while to update. BUT - there is a very neat alternative that I have
recently discovered.

If you use the site www.google.com, you'd find that it has indexed the
DMCNEWS web site very well. If you click on "advanced search" on the main
google page, it brings up a screen where you can set some search
limitations. Tell it to search only the domain dmcnews.com. In the area
where you enter what you are looking for, you can tell it to look for exact
phrases or words. Even more notable, Google keeps a locally cached copy of
all the files searched, and if you click on the cached files link when you
get your results, the "words found" are brightly highlighted. Another
benefit is that as I rearrange and streamline the file structure of the
archive in the coming weeks, the material cached at Google will still work
even if the links to the main page breaks.

An added benefit of Google is that as people perform searches, it "learns"
what links get followed the most and raises their priority in future
searches. This would be very difficult to duplicate in a server-based search
engine. The more you-all use this, the better it will work!

I have no affiliation with Google, I just know a very cool product when I
see it.

Just for fun try searching on your own name or email ID in dmcnews. If you
want to see something that's almost scary, put your name and state in the
form "John Smith TX" (without the quotes) in the search blank on the MAIN
google page. Look at the very top of the search results. YEOW.

I'll add a link to this on the DMCNews backissues and tech sections shortly.

Dave Swingle