OfflineSearch

OfflineSearch is a semantic offline search generator. It scans a directory of html files and generates a javascript search data file. This was primarly written for an offline html documentation and this is also the main target group. Of course it can be be useful on small websites, too.

A frequency file of words can be outputted. This may help to find typos and gives statistical information, that can be used to tweak the stop word list. Maintaining the stop words is crucual to keep the index small. E.g. the index of 11MB of HTML files is about 1.2MB (including double metaphone data and if using a tweaked stop word list)

The double metaphone algorithm can be used to find simlar terms if the search did not find any matches. This performs not to well, but an other (better) algorithm was not found that performed well on a large index.

Default config files, stop word lists and search templates can be generated. Please see the section Usage for details.

The search does not include any boolean logic (OR, NOT, XOR, …). It always tries to find all specified terms.

REMARK: Currently the search index is always written in UTF-8. Future releases will support other encodings.

Executable:

OfflineSearch

Usage:

OfflineSearch [options]
  -c, --config=CONFIG_FILE         configuration file for the offline search

Generators
  -g, --generate-default-config    creates a default config file in the current directory
  -w, --generate-default-stopwords creates a default stopword list in the current directory. Language flag is required.
  -t, --generate-template          creates search template files in the current directory
  -o, --generate-search-data       crawler the documents in the given docpath and generates the search data file

Optional arguments
can also be specified in the config file
command line arguments will overwrite any given value in the config file
  -d, --docpath=DOCPATH            path of the documents
  -f=SEARCH_DATA_FILE              path and name of the search data file
      --search-data-file
  -s=STOPWORD_LIST                 stopword list, if none is specified the default stop word list is used
      --stopword-list
  -l, --language=LANGUAGE          required if you want to generate a default stopword list

  -h, --help                       Show this message

Config-File example:

language: english storage: memory crawler: docpath: ../docs docs: [html, htm] exceptions: stopwords: tags:

title: 150
h1: 50
h2: 25
h3: 18
h4: 13
h5: 11
h6: 9
strong: 7
b: 7
em: 5
i: 5
dt: 9
u: 4
a: 3

logger: file: STDOUT level: info search_generator: search_data_file: search_data.js output_encoding: uft-8 template: base relative_path_to_files: ../docs/ output_frequency_to: frequency.txt

use_double_metaphone: true

Templates===

The shipped templates are very basic, as it is assumed that you integrate the search in your site. The only provide a guidance to how to implement the search on your site.

_ The MIT License

Copyright © 2008 Thomas Peklak

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.