file:// index capability?

[Cat H]

I have purchased your software (it's great), and am currently using it to spider index files on our Intranet website.

I have been tasked to also include files on our network server. What is the best way to do this; or can it be done?

Forgive me if this has already been documented.

[Ray]

Assuming your Intranet webpages have file:// links to your network server, you can allow the spider to index these files by simply enabling the "Scan files linked via 'file://' URLs in spider mode" option, which can be found on the "Scan Options" tab of the Configuration window.

[Cat H]

OK, so it only works with 'file://' URL links to include the files on the server within the same search as the 'http://' links?

I know there is off-line mode indexing, and am I correct that one can't include off-line search results with a spider-mode search?

And finally, are you saying that one can't set up the search engine on the web server to search files that don't have the file:// link?

Thanks!

[Ray]

There are several ways to do this, but first, it helps to explain a few things.

Spider mode works by following HTML links found on a page. Technically, it should also need the pages to be served via a HTTP web server but the option mentioned above allows "file://" links to be included as well.

Now if you don't have file:// links to your Intranet files, then by nature, the spider will not be able to find the files. It's the way HTTP works - you can't get a full listing of all the files on a web server unless you access the folders from the file system directly (in which case, this would be offline mode).

So what you can do, is either:
a) Ensure your Intranet files are linked to the web pages on your server.
b) Add the Intranet files to the Spider as additional start points, by clicking on "More" and specifying them in the form of "file://mycomputer/myfiles/index.html". You can import a list of start points in the form of a text file, if there are many.
c) Use Offline Mode, if the pages served by your web server are not dynamically (server-side) generated pages, then they could also be indexed with Offline mode.

There is no way to combine an index created using Offline Mode and another set of index created using Spider Mode. And there is no way to allow both modes to run to create a single index. But you can include offline results within your website search using one of the methods above.