[TriLUG] Search Engine question

[WA Brown]

Is there a "google" quality search engine out there? Seems to me if some one 
was to start a search engine that was "google" quality and did not keep 
records. there would be a lot of use for this.



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Aaron S. Joyner" <aaron at joyner.ws>
To: "Triangle Linux Users Group discussion list" <trilug at trilug.org>
Sent: Sunday, October 15, 2006 1:30 PM
Subject: Re: [TriLUG] Search Engine question


> Joseph Mack NA3T wrote:
>
>> On Sun, 15 Oct 2006, WA Brown wrote:
>>
>>> I have no experience with search engines. I was wondering if there was 
>>> search engines that I could install on my linux server(Apache 2.0) and 
>>> others could use it?
>>
>>
>> what are you searching? Local pages (htdig, doesn't keep records)? The 
>> internet?
>>
>> Joe
>>
> Just to point out a sticky wicket here, just because htdig isn't 
> explicitly keeping logs, be careful what your httpd access logs are 
> grabbing.  In modern versions of apache, on most distributions, the args 
> to a cgi query are not kept, but you can turn it on if you want to, or you 
> may have in the past for debugging and forgotten about it, or your 
> distribution may have done it for you.  Just one more data point to be 
> aware of in the quest of privacy concerns.
>
> Also, as a note, most locally installed search engines can't do a very 
> good job of "ranking" the pages you have accessible.  They're generally 
> doing simple keyword-search matching, which is to say if you enter the 
> word "foo", pages results will be ranked in the order of number of times 
> "foo" appears appears on the result page.  This is far less accurate and 
> sophisticated than the matching a modern web search engine does (Google is 
> just one example).  It may be quite sufficient for your purposes, but it's 
> good to be aware of the differences so you can evaluate the search quality 
> of the results for yourself.
>
> Aaron S. Joyner
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