ht://Dig

Originally developed at San Diego State University, the ht://Dig software is open source and consists of several different programs:

• ht://Dig: a gathering program that "digs" through your Web site and creates an index of terms
  
  
• htsearch: used to actually search the index created by ht://Dig
  
  
• htnotify: notifies you when your pages are out of date.

These programs offer many features to help Web publishers manage their sites. Using ht://Dig, publishers can:

• Customize search form and search results pages -- Web publishers can include custom headers, footers and navigation on their results page.
  
  
• Index only files actually linked from other Web pages -- unlike the freeWAIS software used previously, ht://Dig only indexes pages that are linked from other Web pages. You can upload content pages to your Web site and not worry about ht://Dig finding them unless you link to them.
  
  
• Index pages on multiple servers -- if your site is on more than one server, ht://Dig can create a single searchable index for content on multiple servers.
  
  
• Support custom tuning of search results -- perhaps the biggest challenge with search tools is getting the most relevant results listed first. ht://Dig lets you tune the relevancy of your search results in many different ways. For example, you can increase the relevancy of pages that have the search term in a heading tag through the ht://Dig configuration file.
  
  
• Build and rebuild search indexes easily -- to create a search index for your site, fill out the request form (requires UT EID) and an ITS Web consultant will contact you to walk you through the process of using ht://Dig and create an initial index for your site. All indexes are automatically rebuilt weekly.
  
  
• Include or exclude certain sections of the site in the search -- from one index you can limit the search results to certain directories so you don't have to maintain different indexes.

For more information, see the ht://Dig documentation.