Bill-

Thanks for asking.

Since most of the developers are Unix-types, and swish-e was written 
from a Unix perspective, you're right: the documents do have that 
assumption sort of built in.

SWISH-E is, as you know, written, maintained and supported completely by 
volunteers. As with most of the open source community, you're most 
likely to get help if you have *specific* questions that we can answer.

You've set yourself a big goal of spidering a "massive" site and wanting 
your search engine to act like google. SWISH-E might be able to help 
with that, but like most open source software, it will require lots of 
hours of tweeking, debugging, testing, researching, etc., to get your 
vision anywhere close to reality. SWISH-E is not "open source google". 
Instead, it is a tool in what is hopefully a toolchest of tools that can 
help you create a search engine.

If you are having such a hard time with getting SWISH-E to work, and the 
documentation isn't helpful to you, it seems to me you have a few 
choices: (1) commit yourself to the hours (days) it will take you to 
climb the learning curve, knowing that *specific* questions to this 
email list will likely be answered in as helpful a way as possible, or 
(2) hire someone to do it for you, or (3) look for a ready-to-go 
off-the-shelf search engine for windows (one that will likely cost you 
as much as #2).

best of luck,
pek

Bill.Hansard@faa.gov wrote on 7/14/04 8:17 AM:

> 
> 
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I have been lurking on this discussion group for some time and have been
> unable to get any tips that help me yet.  I sent a mail to this list almost
> a year ago asking for help, but got a response to "read the documents". I
> am wondering if there isn't maybe someone out there willing to help me with
> this.
> 
> Just a little background : I have been a "hardware guy" for a number of
> years and have never gotten into programming. When I read the documents, I
> really can't make much sense of them because I immediately get lost in some
> of the language used in them.  I DO NOT understand most of the things that
> the documents say to do.  It seems that most of the documents are written
> with the assumption that everyone is using the source code and compiling
> the software or are using some kind of UNIX box.
> 
> I have gotten the swish-e windows binary installed on a windows NT box
> along with the latest PERL.  I can't make sense of the documents to get the
> config file working or make the front end for an IIS based web page that I
> have made in Frontpage2000.  Additionally, I want to spider the entire
> FAA's website (which is MASSIVE) and create a "google like" search engine
> for the FAA's intranet.
> 
> I'm afraid that I'm just a BIG DUMMY when it comes to programming, but I
> want very much to learn how to make this work.  Could someone out there
> PLEASE HELP????????
> 
> Thanks,
>                                          
>  Bill                                    
>                                          
>  Lake Charles ATC Tower                  
>                                          
>  Support Specialist / LAN Administrator  
>  Certified Professional Controller       
>                                          
>  1-337-477-2016                          
>                                          
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 

-- 
Peter Karman - Software Publications Engineer - Cray Inc
phone: 651-605-9009 - mailto:karman@cray.com