Hot Searches with ColdFusion
By Sanjay Patel and Charles Linville
All the information in the world is useless if you can't locate it.
Historically, search engines have been either labor intensive—such as Microsoft's Index Server, and wide area information servers (WAIS)—or expensive, or both. And sadly, the free search engines, like Excite's EWS, have not been very flexible.
Fortunately, in the middle ground, there's Allaire's ColdFusion (version 3.1 or later), which lets you create a very robust search engine using the integrated Verity Search97 software. Although Search97 isn't a full-featured Verity search engine, this combination is extremely flexible, letting you create an internal search feature (of your Web pages, news articles, and other content) with relatively minimal effort and configuration. The integrated search capability supports several file formats including HTML, PDF, and Microsoft Word. We'll show you how to create a basic search engine and demonstrate a more advanced example combining lexical and META tag searches. (You can find out more information on ColdFusion from Allaire's site and on optimizing Verity collections at the Verity page; the URLs are listed on the "
Online
Resources.")
The Basics
The basic flow and structure for a ColdFusion search is as follows:
- The user enters keywords into the search input form and can select other criteria.
