/private/Net/cernvax/userd/tbl/hypertext/WWW/Addre...

Address for an index Search

If a given hypertext node is an index, or the server has an indexassociated with it, then a search may be done on that index by suffixingthe name of the index with a list of keywords, after a question mark: address_of_index ? keywordlistThe address of the index is a normal hypertext address. In the keywordlist,multiple keywords are separated by plus signs (+) . (See BNF syntaxdescription .) The resulting string still does not contain any spaces.It may be considered to be the hypertext address of a document whichis the result of making the keyword search on the index. Normally,if the search was successful, the document returned will contain anchorsleading to other documents which match the selection criteria.

The search method, and the logical and lexical functions, weights,etc applied to the keywords will depend on the index address. Oneactual index may have several hypertext addresses, which when searchedon will behave in different ways. For example, one may allow a searchon author-given keywords only, while another may be a full text search.These things particular to an index should be descibed in the hypertextpage for the index node itself (or in linked documents). For example,a server may allow specific boolean search combinations may be representedby the words 'and', 'or' and 'not'.

Example:

http://cernvm/FIND/?sgml+cmsindicates the result of perfoming a search for keywords 'sgml' and'cms' on the index http://cernvm/FIND/.