On Tue, 1 Dec 1998, Rainer Scherg wrote:

> Yak! What are search engines for?
> To offer a pointer to the documents I'm searching for, and to provide 
> a short "abstract"/description (first 100 words or description tag) about
> the document.

	From the *user* perspective, yes.  If I were to write the script
	I mentioned and installed it on a web site, you would not know
	the difference.

> Doing such things via perl is not the way to go, because it's to slow 

	Have you tried it?  If not, how do you *know* it's slow?

> and if you are doing such things via perl, you could also do the complete
> search engine with find -name '*.htm" -print | grep "$what"...

	No, because Perl can not index 4 million words in 8 minutes;
	but for printing abstracts, it's just fine.

	There have been people who has written in who have used this
	technique sucessfully before: proof it works (and presumeably
	sufficiently quickly).

	- Paul