Search Help

The ht://Dig Search Engine at SFSU

For complete documentation on ht://Dig, see the ht://Dig.org web site.

About | Update Frequency | Noindex Directory | Document Weighting | Add a SFSU search box

The ht://Dig search engine 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 span several web servers at a site. Documents not in the sfsu.edu "domain" are excluded from the index

Words shorter than three characters are not indexed. Words shorter than this value will be ignored but still put into the excerpt placed on the search results page.

Word Matches: If a word match is found in the first 500 characters of a document, an excerpt of the document will be displayed when using the LONG search format. The first matched word will be bolded in the middle of the excerpt so that there is some surrounding context.

Indexing is limited by the number of hops or clicks a document is removed from the starting URL. Currently defined as seven hops from the server home page to include the neighborhood of the documents being referenced on any subsequent linked pages.

How often we index the server

The central index is updated daily at midnight
Changes you make to your pages will not be reflected in the index until the next reindex is done

Hiding web pages from our search engine

Web pages under development or being tested can be stored in a directory named "noindex"
The content of a noindex directory in your web account will not be included in the central server index
You will be able to view the pages as normal with your browser e.g. http://www.sfsu.edu/~myaccount/noindex/testpage.htm

Bringing your page higher in the search results

Documents are weighted and assigned stars based on an algorithm using the heading, keyword and title factors as well as content inside a HTML document. By using factors that are weighted higher the document will show up higher in the search results and be assigned more stars. More stars signify the document has more relevance to the search request.

The heading factors are

<H1> heading_factor_1: 5
<H2> heading_factor_2: 4
<H3> heading_factor_3: 3
<H4> heading_factor_4: 1
<H5> heading_factor_5: 1
<H6> heading_factor_6: 0

Keywords are also used is a weighting factor. To add keywords to your documents, use the following code in the <HEAD> section of your HTML document

<META name="keywords" value="keyword1, keyword2, keyword3">

Notice that repeated words rank your page higher. For complete documentation on ht://Dig, see the http://htdig.org web site.

The document title is also a weighting factor and is how the document is linked in the search return results.

Add a customized SFSU search box for Department and Faculty pages

The following code will allow you to add your own search box to your page.

<form method="post" action="http://www.sfsu.edu/cgi-bin/htsearch">
<p align="left">Search Term(s):
<input type=hidden name=method value=and>
<input type=hidden name=format value=builtin-short>
<input type=hidden name=config value=htdig>
<input type=hidden name=restrict value="http://www.sfsu.edu/~accountname">
<input type=text name="words" value="" size=50>
<INPUT type=submit value="Search" ALT="Search">
</p> </form>

Departments with accounts on www.sfsu.edu must replace the accountname with the name of your account.
<input type=hidden name=restrict value="http://www.sfsu.edu/~accountname">

Faculty using the server online should change the name of the server to online.sfsu.edu and replace the accountname with the name of your account.
<input type=hidden name=restrict value="http://online.sfsu.edu/~accountname">

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Last modified February 11, 2008 by the Web Team