ANNOUNCEMENT: ALIWEB (Archie-Like Indexing for the WEB)

[Martijn Koster]

I posted this before, but I don't think it ever went anywhere,
so here goes again:

Announcing ALIWEB

Every week there is somebody on this newsgroup asking for
veronica/archie for the WWW. These people are usually referred
to several of the excellent hand-maintained index databases on
the Web. But an automatic indexer would be nice...

ALIWEB is an experiment in automatic 'distributed' indexing:
a WWW server advertises its contents in a local file, which is
automatically retrieved and processed proactively by a single
site. The combined database of these indices can of course be
searched from the Web.

This is a first step to distributed indexing in the web, and by no
means a final solution. But it is simple, has relatively low overhead,
and may serve well for some time, and I'd urge WWW server maintainers
to consider joining in this experiment. When beter schemes come along
it should be easy to use/convert this data.

It's all done via the Web, for all details see

http://web.nexor.co.uk/aliweb/doc/aliweb.html

I look forward to people's comments...

-- Martijn
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