Hello Douglas, hello Bill,

 > 1. The system is almost too flexible to start, perhaps there
 > should be a simpler install to get started?

I understand what you mean.

A "click-and-go" frontend for evaluating swish-e would certainly be a 
good thing, helping a lot of people.

(I'm not into Perl, but I'd like to contribute to such a project if PHP 
were OK as the programming language. What do you think?)

However, I'd like to share my (quite different) perspective with you:

swish-e was quite appealing to me exactly because it was at its core 
nothing but a command line executable; this showed me that the actual 
indexing/search engine was cleanly separated from the spidering engine 
and the CGI user interface.

Doing "./configure/make/make install" and reading the nice online 
documentation got me started with a first working command line 
index/search on my own data within maybe 30 minutes.

Yes, I was forced to read the documentation, but that's what I'm going 
to do anyway when evaluating something (unless the documentation is 
missing or overly complex).

I never used spidering or swish.cgi - I wrote my own web search frontend 
in PHP (which was easy to do), and now I'm even calling swish-e (the 
Windows executable) from within Delphi applications.

Just my .02 :-)

Regards,
Tim

-- 
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Tim Strehle, Developer
Digital Collections              http://www.digicol.com
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