UNH Infoseek:
Customized Search Forms.
author and contact: cwis.admin@unh.edu
updated

We offer a standard search page for the Infoseek search engine. But you can develop your own customized search form and put it on any of your Web pages. You can customize not only the physical design of the search form, more importantly, you can control the kind of search that takes place. This includes searching the Intranet index for particular subsets of pages and how the results are formatted.

In these examples the link to each form opens a separate window, with the discussion of the form on this page.

Custom Search for CIS KB pages.

Try: search-form-kb

Discussion: You can pre-define a group of pages to be searched on a form, by taking advantage of Infoseek's "search these results" feature. In this case we are able to define a set of pages that logically comprise the CIS Knowledge Base by consistent use of HTML META tags, even though they are distributed over multiple servers. To do this we need to assign a META tag that is unique to our pages of interest. CIS adopted a series of keywords tags for the Knowledge Base and we ask you not to use those. That was before we became aware of the Dublin Core META tags which are a better way to do that.

Look at the form. The radio button for the CIS Knowledge Base pages is set by default. That causes a search within pages that have a META tag keyword of five Z's. Searching on "lynx" matches 9 results. Handy alternatives are provided on the form for searching all of the UNH Intranet (146 matches for lynx) and for the Internet-wide Infoseek search engine (152,242 matches for lynx).

Compact search forms.

Try: search-form-compact

Discussion: This shows two alternative compact, bare-bones search form layouts. In addition the first search form changes two of the usual search parameters. The first example has a white background while the second example sets the form on a blue background. Such design is an open-ended process, limited only by the context in which you will use it and your design skills. One "trick" used here in the form design is to specify "type=image" as an attribute-value and use a graphic submit button, instead of using the standard "type=submit" attribute-value.

The first search form sets parameter "rf=1" so that results are sorted by document date instead of the relevance score, and it sets parameter "lk=2" so that results are shown in condensed form, without the document summaries. Try the same search with both compact forms to see the difference. Note that with the condensed results (first form), even though the results are sorted by date, the relevance scores are still shown.

Pull-down search for multiple URLs.

Try: search-form-multi

Discussion: This example makes use of a pull-down menu or scrolling list. Each menu item is associated with the URL for a collection of pages, either a whole server or a directory on a server. The form is set up for a "search these results" with the results defined by the URL. This makes use of the special Infoseek syntax in which you can search for text that occurs anywhere in a URL.

Search based on file modification date.

Try: search-form-dates

Discussion: Infoseek supports several kinds of date restrictions to limit a search based on the modification date of a Web document when it was indexed. This is available as part of the standard "Advanced" search page. You can incorporate date restrictions as part of your own Infoseek search form and this example shows two ways, one relative to current time and one based on a calendar begin and end date.

Search for calendar information.

Try: search-form-calendars

Discussion: This demonstrates an effort to allow searching for calendar information in a guided way: selection among a limited number of Web sites/servers; user-supplied words to search for; and a date restriction.

Search with a smut filter.

Try: search-form-smut

Discussion: This is an example of filtering (or, more pejoratively, censoring) what is allowed in the search terms. It is a JavaScript implementation of something called a "smut engine" to do the filtering, but is otherwise a standard Infoseek search. The search term is first processed by the in-line JavaScript code before it is sent to Infoseek. If any words on the prohibited list are found, gobbledy-gook is substituted for them. Try "pedophile" as an example -- you can see the complete list by viewing the form source. BTW, the prohibited words in the JavaScript are not indexed by Infoseek because they occur in the HEAD section between SCRIPT tags. (There is a bug or "feature" in this script that sometimes allows a prohibited word to go through without filtering.) [NOTE: there is currently in this script that prevents it from blocking the first use of a term.]

Real UNH Intranet examples.

There are some live pages on the UNH Intranet that now using these customization techniques.

See: Continuing Education and Summer Session

Discussion: All of the Continuing Education and Summer Session Web pages are on a single server, so the search form is customized to define a search within just that server. That makes use of two parameters to specify a search within existing results:
  name=rq value=1
  name=oq value="url:www.learn.unh.edu"
Which you can examine in context if you view source for that Web page.

See: CIS Knowledge Base via the Help Desk

Discussion: The Computing Help Desk in CIS uses a Web-based series of pages as the knowledge base to search. The collection is distributed over multiple servers and the form is set up to either search the entire collection or each subsection. An original design decision was to use keywords defined in HTML META tags to make this possible and the form uses both the "rq" and "oq" parameters to make this possible, in conjunction with a pull-down menu of selections. The "oq" defaults to "ZZZZZ" to search the whole collection and that is overridden according to what is selected on the menu, for example, substituting "HHHHH" if Help Desk is selected. View source for that Web page for details.

See: University of New Hampshire Libraries

Discussion: Similar to other examples, in use of a search within an existing pre-defined search.