Glimpse HTTP Overview

GlimpseHTTP is a collection of tools that allows you to use Glimpse to search your files using HTTP interface. In other words, it is "Glimpse search engine - HTTP" gateway. Glimpse indices are smaller than, for example, WAIS indices (they are typically 3-10% of the source), glimpse gives you the line containing the match (like grep), and glimpse provides more query options (e.g., allowing errors, regular expressions). Glimpse, however, does not provide ranking. (Click here for a list of sites using GlimpseHTTP.)

Furthermore, GlimpseHTTP allows you to integrate search with browsing. If you have several nested directories which the user may browse, you can include the glimpse interface in each document such that only the relevant directories will be included in the search. More details are given below.

The current version of GlimpseHTTP was tested under httpd 1.2 HTML server from NCSA and Glimpse currently works on many Unix platforms. To search and browse the information any HTML browser can be used (this includes NCSA Mosaic for X-Windows, MS-Windows and Macintosh, Lynx and other browsers. For maximum convenience your browser should support forms, although minimal functionality can be achieved with any browser).

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Maintained by Michael Smith
glimpse@cs.arizona.edu