Thu, 10 Dec 2015
Making Gopher Search More Useful
The floodgap server has a decent gopher search service [0][1]. Unfortunately, it does not do full-text search. You can help make the search more useful by making your gopher filenames and selectors more descriptive. So, for example, say you create a gopher document on Linux security. Instead of creating 'sec.txt' name it 'sysadmin_tips_for_linux_system_security.txt'. Then you will see your document in searches for those component words. If you use a gophermap, create some nicely descriptive display text, something like 'Linux Security Tips for Sysadmins'.
Here is a concrete example - I posted the Edgar Rice Burroughs Barsoom novels on my gopher site. The selector is as follows:
/users/slugmax/docs/books/barsoom_stories_burroughs
and in my gophermap, the description is this:
Edgar Rice Burrough's Barsoom series in glorious text
...and here is the Veronica search output:
You can find the novels by searching Veronica-2 for 'barsoom' or
'burroughs', or even 'glorious':
*** Search terms: glorious ***
First 30 selectors displayed (page 1).
Results sorted by apparent relevance.
5 total matches.
(?) [2]Enter new search keywords
(FILE) [3]Folders/directories are least accurate! (and other notes)
(FILE) [4]Refining your query
------------------------------------------------------------
(DIR) [5]Edgar Rice Burrough's Barsoom series in glorious text
gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/slugmax/docs/books/barsoom_stories_burroughs
...
- [0] gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/v2
- [1] https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?a=gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/v2
posted at: 21:32 | path: / | permalink | gopher, search, tips, veronica