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Using HouseSpider 4.7

Developed by Keith L. Jackson - up to and including version 4.0 - and later by Hans Fr. Nordhaug. This version was released 22nd of May 2005.

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 at least 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" tea | coffee Will match pages that don't contain the phrase "hello you " and contain one of the words "tea" and "coffee"..

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


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