search a foreign directory

[Anonymous Monk]

i am trying to write a program that searches the documents in a foreign website simply because no body puts a search engine in their site themselves. i get how to search for words in documents in my own site, but how do i do it in someone elses? my dream is to be able to just put in; search:www.whatever.com for:perl, and then it will search all the documents in that directory for the word perl and then send back links. IS THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK?!?!?! : )

[suaveant]

well... the easy way would be to use something like wget which supports recursive downloads, then search it locally...

Or you could write a web spider of your own in perl using LWP and search the pages each time (or make a local copy as with the wget). Probably be a good idea to cache the pages locally for a while and search them locally, then rebuild the link and go to the actual site.

of course, google and altavista have an option to search within a specific domain, so if they are in there you could just use them :)

Update BTW, to use the domain searching in AV and google go to their Advanced Search pages
                - Ant

[cLive ;-)]

You dont have to go to the advanced search page. Altavista supports (amongst others) these nice little shortcuts:

+host:domain.com - only search for results on this domain
+link:domain.com - only search for results that link to domain.com

The latter is useful when you want to see who's linked to your site :)

Just include them along with your search term to restrict. This means you can create a search of the site easily by auto populating a search box with the +host:domain.com string and allowing users to enter their term. Or use JavaScript to hide the term and present an empty search box.

cLive ;-)