CGI Program: Ultraseek Search

What is CGI?

Overview

Ultraseek is a powerful and flexible search engine that was purchased by AcIS in June 1999 as a replacement for our other search engines: Glimpse, Excite, and Webinator. It was owned by Infoseek at that time. Since then it was sold to Inktomi and then sold to Verity. We have several Ultraseek collections (web indexes) for various purposes. Our main Ultraseek index is accessible from the Columbia search page and includes about 240,000 web documents on 100 web sites at Columbia University.

To add an Ultraseek search box to your web page select an example from the following list and then modify it so it searches your web directory.

Examples

Find an example that suits your needs and then use View Source to see the HTML code. The simplest example is the first one.

Search /cu/help/jdk

Simple search: one directory

Search /cu/business and www.gsb.columbia.edu

Simple search: two web directories on separate web servers

Select a directory to search

User gets a list of choices so they can select the subdirectory to be searched

Search /cu/help/jdk

Simple search plus advanced search: one directory

Search /~beecher

Personal web pages are in a separate index: cuwebi

Customization Notes

• All of these examples use the site tag or the url tag to identify which site or which directory is to be searched.

• When a search directory is specified Ultraseek also searches all subdirectories of that directory.

• The col variable specifies which collection to search. Only one collection can be specified on each search form:

  The cuweb collection contains all CUWeb documents except personal web pages.

  The cuwebi collection contains only personal web pages.

• The site tag or the url tag is specified on the web form using the query prefix parameter qp. In order to restrict your search to a particular directory you must set this to the desired URL or to a space-separated list of URLs. The qp parameter must start with a plus sign if it contains one URL:

  <input type=hidden name=qp value="+url:/cu/help/jdk">
  

  but it must not start with a plus sign if it contains more than one URL:

  <input type=hidden name=qp value="url:/cu/business url:www.gsb.columbia.edu">
  

• Linking to the advanced search form is a bit tricky. You must %-encode the directory name in the URL. If you want to create an advanced form that searches +url:/cu/help/jdk (as in the advanced search example) you would encode that information like this:

  qp=+url%3A%2Fcu%2Fhelp%2Fjdk
  

Online Documentation

• A description of the Ultraseek search form variables is in Chapter 3 (pages 45-68) of the Ultraseek Customization Guide

Last modified 12/12/05 12:18 Academic Information Systems Columbia University

Help Line: 212 854.1919 Email: consultant@columbia.edu