Tripecac - Search

I implemented my own search engine back before Google became popular. It's more complete than google (for searching this site), but isn't as friendly. I've included Google search too.

My search tool returns a list of documents on this server which contain one or more of the specified keywords. It searches every HTML file in the specified path(s), and does not use indexes. This makes it a little slow, but pretty thorough.

Keywords

• Use the + prefix to denote required keywords. For example, bill +gates will return documents with at least one occurance of "gates" (but maybe not "bill"). Among the results, documents with lots of "gates" will rank higher than those with lots of "bill".
• Use double quotes to enclose phrases. So, "bill gates" will return documents which contain the term "bill" followed by white space and then "gates". Independent occurances of "bill" and "gates" are ignored.
• Searches are case-insensitive.
• Keywords can currently match substrings in the source documents. This means the query "q" will return a list of all the documents which contain the letter q. If you want to search for words starting with q, you can try " q", and for words that consist solely of the letter q (surrounded by white space), you can try " q ". Right now I don't handle punctuation specially, so " q. " won't result in a match if the query is " q ".

Max Results

• This specifies the maximum number of pages to display in the results.
• Lowering this number does not speed up searches; it simply reduces the size of the results page.