ht://Dig system

The ht://Dig system is a complete World Wide Web indexing and searching system for a domain or intranet. This system is not meant to replace the need for powerful internet-wide search systems like Lycos, Infoseek, Google and AltaVista.

Instead it is meant to cover the search needs for a single company, campus, or even a particular sub section of a web site. As opposed to some WAIS-based or web-server based search engines, ht://Dig can easily span several web servers. The type of these different web servers doesn't matter as long as they understand common protocols like HTTP. ht://Dig has the ability to search through many servers on a network by acting as a WWW browser.

Searches can be arbitrarily complex using Boolean expressions. The output of a search can easily be tailored to every user’s needs by means of providing HTML templates. When searching in ht://Dig, there are various configurable algorithms that can be used or performed. Currently the following algorithms are supported (in any combination) are exact, soundex, metaphone, common word endings (stemming), synonyms, accent stripping and substring and prefix.

ht://Dig can be told to use a specific username and password when it retrieves documents. This can be used to index a server or parts of a server that are protected by a username and password. On the other hand, it is also easy to set up a search which only returns documents whose URL matches a certain pattern. This becomes very useful for people who want to make their own data searchable without having to use a separate search engine or database.