More searchers (was WWW general information request)

Nick Arnett (narnett@verity.com)
Wed, 11 Jan 1995 23:04:30 +0100


At 2:07 PM 1/11/95, Hugh Secker-Walker wrote:

> The FAQ will give you pointers to the HTML Primer, the Beginner's Guide
> to HTML and to more in-depth sources.

We have a searcher agent for general Web beginner information at
<URL:http://www.verity.com:8089/?exiturl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.verity.com%2Fvlibs
earch.html&qparser=simple&query=www-FAQ-list>.

We also have a subset of that agent, specifically about set-up and
configuration information, at
<URL:http://www.verity.com:8089/?exiturl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.verity.com%2Fvlibs
earch.html&qparser=simple&query=set-up-FAQs>.

Contrary to what the names of the agents might suggest, they search much
more than just FAQ lists; they search our entire Verity Virtual Library.

By the way, today we added a number of e-mail lists to the Library,
including www-proxy, www-rdb, and others. We're also expanding the number
of Web sites... and we should have Usenet included within a few days.

You can broaden the agents' searches with additional words, separated from
their names by commas, or you can narrow the search using "and" but you
need to escape spaces and angle brackets... e.g., to search for setup
information about servers, you'd use
<URL:http://www.verity.com:8089/?exiturl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.verity.com%2Fvlibs
earch.html&qparser=simple&query=set-up-faqs+%3Cand%3E+server>.

You can enter searcher agent names and additional queries from a generic
search screen at <URL:http://www.verity.com/vlibsearch.html>... saving all
of the escaping and such. On that screen, you'd use "www-FAQ-list <and>
server" for the query above.

The indexes are being updated somewhat irregularly at present, while we
bring everything up. Shortly, they'll be on a schedule that'll update
Usenet in real-time (that would be *our* feed's real-time; yours may vary),
the mailing lists every night, and the Web sites a maximum of every 7 days.

The mailing lists can be browsed any time; the time lag for them is usually
no more than an hour or two. (BTW, there's a known bug with properly cited
URLs, as I have them in this very message -- the text-to-hypertext
conversion includes the trailing angle bracket. This will be fixed soon.)

The home page for the Verity Virtual Library is
<URL:http://www.verity.com/library.html>.

Nick