Logo HouseSpider Homepage Installation »Project »Download

Using HouseSpider 4.4

Developed by Keith L. Jackson - up to and including version 4.0 - and later by Hans Fr. Nordhaug. This version was released 14th of January 2003.

HouseSpider is a Java applet that adds indexing and search capability to a web site. The example above is set up to spider through the homepage for HouseSpider - housespider.sf.net. The pages for version 4.0 is excluded from the search using the "URLExclude" tag.

There are four elements to its user interface:
  1. Text input box - upper left. Enter your search term here.
  2. Combined start/stop search and go button. When you enter a search term the button to the right of the text input box turns into a magnifying glass. Click this button to start an exhaustive search of the web site. Click it once more to stop a search before all result are found. Some notes on searching are listed below: When the search is done and a link is chosen from the site list, the button will change to an arrow (go) button.
  3. Help button. This button will take you to this page.
  4. Site list - lower window. Web pages associated with the search term are displayed here. You may select a listing and then double-click or click the arrow (go) button to go to the link. If a link is selected, its corresponding URL is displayed in the browser's status line (just like when your mouse is over a link in a normal web page).

In addition there is a optional status line located under the site list.

Search terms

The search terms in the text input box can consist of phrases, exclude words or logical expressions. Case is always ignored. (In my and Google's opinion case-sensitive searches are not needed.)

Some examples:

Text input box     Meaning of input
"hello you" bye Will match pages containing the phrase "hello you" and the word "bye".
hello | you | bye Will match pages containing minimum one of the words "hello", "you" and "bye".
hello you bye Will match pages containing all the words "hello", "you" and "bye".
hello & you & bye Same as above.
hello +you +bye Same as above.
hello -you bye Will match pages containing the words "hello" and "bye", but not "you".
-"hello you" tee | coffee Will match pages that doesn't contain the phrase "hello you " and contains one of the words "tee" and "coffee"..

Note that you should quote the search word if special characters and/or logical operators appear in the start of the word.


Valid HTML 4.0!