Re: Searching (was Re: Lotus Notes -- Too much Hype !!!)

Nick Arnett (narnett@verity.com)
Thu, 8 Sep 1994 11:32:06 -0800


At 1:54 PM 9/8/94 +0500, Gavin Nicol wrote:
>Actually, searching is also one of the strong points for SGML document
>system too. Once can usually search for "foo within <bar>", which is a
>very nice way to limit the scope of searches.

Does anyone know of an engine that does this yet? We're talking with some
SGML experts so that we can figure out the right technical strategy and
we're talking with everyone on this list about HTML...

Clearly the potential is tremendous, but the search engines have to have a
document model that mirrors the right aspects of structured text.

FYI, most engines at best just have the notion of "zones" -- phrases,
sentences and paragraphs -- and attributes, which would be fielded
meta-information. We are designing a generic capability to take header
information from an HTML document and put it into our attribute fields.
I'm digging up the old "META" discussion to see what, if anything, we
decided is a minimal standard.

Now if we just had one more software engineer... ;-)

Nick