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The CHAmois Mountaineering Club | Low Graphics Version

Monday 6th Sepember 2010
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Within this Section: Make this your homepage | Search the site

Search the Site FAQ

The specific CHAmois site searches (general, meet write-ups, picture of the months and world clubs) can now all be accessed from the main search page. This makes it easier to jump from one search to another keeping the same terms.

What does the ANY/ALL option do?
How does the search engine rank the results?
What does it mean "These word(s) are too common"?
What are all the search tabs for?
Who made the search engine?
Why did you make your own search engine?
How did you make the search engine?

What does the ANY/ALL option do?
This option allows you to specify whether to find pages containing any of your search words or only return pages that contain them all.

How does the search engine rank the results?
On the general site search, results are ranked by the frequency that the words appear in a page. The pages will also be ranked higher if the words appear in the page title. The meets and picture of the month searches work in a similar way. The clubs search ranks a page higher if the search terms contain the name or location of the club. However it also trys to use some intelligence so that, for instance, it knows the difference between New York and York.

What does it mean "These word(s) are too common"?
Certain words are very common (e.g. to, at, in, which etc) and appear in quite a lot of pages on the site. The search engine ignores these words in order to reduce the number of results returned. The search engine will tell you which terms it ignored.

What are all the search tabs for?
The website has evolved over several years and specific searches were developed as and when they were needed. They all have specific search criteria which would be very complicated to bring together into one search. Therefore I decided to keep them seperate but to provide easy access to all of them from one form. This is done in a similar style to BBCi search or the Google searches.

Who made the search engine?
The search engine was created from scratch by Stuart Lowe (CHAmois Webmaster).

Why did you make your own search engine?

When I first wanted to add a search feature to the site there were not really many free searches around. Those that were free generally had adverts and it was difficult to customise the results page. I was also worried that results pages that didn't look like the rest of the site would confuse visitors to my site. So, after getting a second-hand book on perl (Creating Cool Web Pages with Perl, Jerry Muelver, IDG Books Worldwide) I decided to have a go myself.

How did you make the search engine?

All four searches consist of two parts; an index and a search script. An index is created by stripping out the page title, non-HTML words and image ALT tags. The number of times a word appears on a page can be counted. The search script is what the visitor interacts with; it reads the query string (i.e. the part of a URL after the question mark) and then looks in the index file for all the pages that contain the search words. Each page is then ranked by either the frequency (general search), likeliness (club search) or chronologically (meets/pictures of the month).

The scripts were created in Perl using Notepad/Textpad and were inspired by Creating Cool Web Pages with Perl by Jerry Muelver. They have gradually evolved and although the code is very clumsy it seems to work. It is still nowhere near as good as Google though!