search within meta data?

[Thunderstone]

I made an index of some html files, and included this:
-meta=author,date,keywords

Sure enough, the meta tags for <meta name=AUTHOR ...>
and <meta name=DATE ...> were processed.

But how do I search on them? I want to search
for all files written by a certain AUTHOR.
What's the syntax for that? I'm using the default
search form that came with webinator.

bobg

[Thunderstone]

The meta field is indexed along with the rest by default. Nothing
special is required to search Title, Meta, and Body at once.

If you want to search just Meta, you would have to create
a metamorph inverted index on the Meta field.
See http://www.thunderstone.com/texisman/node120.html
Something like:
gw -st "create metamorph inverted index xmmeta on html(Meta)"
And adjust your search script to search "Meta" instead of "Title\Meta\Body".
You will also need to reissue that create statement after walking new
pages with gw, as gw won't know about your custom index.

[Thunderstone]

Yes.

[dietric]

What if I want to search for any term but limit the results to pages containing (a) certain meta tag(s) value(s)?

[mark]

Add an "and Meta like $metaquery" clause to the sql in the search script and set metaquery to the desired value.

[dietric]

Hmm... we're using the search applicance, so we're just passing this as a URL paramter - will that work?

[mark]

You posted to a webinator group so my answer was based on using webinator. You can't modify the scripts on the appliance. On the appliance you'll just have to include the meta search terms in the main query. It searches both content and meta data.