What is indexing in Web Application to make faster search

[jack martin]

Dear All,

I have developed one search page in my application.Now i want to know what is indexed site (application). It may be basic question.

How can i write (change) my code being indexed or do i need to change configuration on server or any other?.

Thanks in Advance,
Jack.

[Bear Bibeault]

"jack_martin",

There aren't many rules that you need to worry about here on the Ranch, but one that we take very seriously regards the use of proper names. Please take a look at the JavaRanch Naming Policy and adjust your display name to match it.

In particular, your display name must be a first and a last name separated by a space character, and must not be obviously fictitious. To be compliant, all you need to do is to replace the underscore in your display name with a space.

Thanks!
bear
JavaRanch Sheriff

[steve souza]

Please clarify what you are asking and provide a few more details.

[jack martin]

Dear Steve,

I want to know,What is indexing for web site to make it search faster across the site.

Thanks
Jack

[Ulf Dittmer]

I want to know,What is indexing for web site to make it search faster across the site.

Well, that's just about what you wrote at first, but it's not clear what that means. Do you have a search and it's too slow? If so, does it not use an index, and now you want to add one to speed up searching? Does it have an index, but it's still too slow? It's also hard to advise unless you tell us how you index, how you search, what kind of software is used, what gets searched (web pages, databases, files, ...) etc.

[Sandeep Deb]

Jack,
There is very little information to answer in specifics, but if you are looking for search engines which can index your content, try exploring Lucene. Apache Lucene is a high-performance, full-featured text search engine library written entirely in Java. It is a technology suitable for nearly any application that requires full-text search, especially cross-platform.

You can find more information about Lucene on Apache's site here

I hope this helps.

- Sandeep

[Stan James]

Sounds like we're after the base concept of indexing. Without indexing, you'd probably have to read through all of your site content to find something. So if I searched for "java" you might read some static HTML pages, some database entries, some jsp source, who knows what. Very slow indeed.

Indexing reads all of that stuff once and makes a list of what it finds and where. So if I search for "java" we could go to the index and see that "java" was found on a dozen pages and get the URLS very quickly.

Indexing can be quite tricky. What if you want to find two words that are close together, or have "party" find "parties"?

Lucene, mentioned above, is a nifty indexer. You feed your content through it once and it builds an index that can handle all kinds of slick search requests. I use it on a Wiki that lets anyone update any page any time. When somebody changes a page, I re-index just that page. The folks who built Lucene also made Nutch which can "crawl" your site and index all the pages for you, I think.

Does that go the right direction?