Searching With Isearch
Moving Beyond WAIS
By Nassib Nassar
Looking for a search engine that meets your specific requirements can be a formidable task. There are so many to choose from that you practically need a search engine to find them all. Over the years of working with the Wide Area Information Server (WAIS) model, it became clear that while searching methods and implementations were continually improving, we needed a model that would not become obsolete after a few months. Isearch was developed as a building block for beginning a new information system or adapting to an existing server. This article aims to introduce Isearch and give you an idea of how it can be used.
Search-Engine History
As search-engine expert Erik Scott puts it, "In the beginning, there was grep." Searching software has come a long way since grep, and search algorithms are continually becoming smarter and faster. One of the earliest popular search systems on the Internet was WAIS, an information system that combined an indexing and searching engine with an information-retrieval interface, making it possible to search databases anywhere on the Internet. Unfortunately, the word WAIS came to mean almost anything: an information-retrieval model, a network protocol, a search system, a software package, and a company name.
The most widely used implementation of WAIS was freeWAIS (see "
Online"), a WAIS software package free to the public.
