Steps to Build an Index

This section will give you a brief tutorial of how to build the index for the SiteSurfer applet. When you launch SiteSurfer Builder, you will be greeted with an introductory screen about SiteSurfer. Press the Next

button to proceed. SiteSurfer should now prompt you for the address of the site you wish to index.

For the purposes of this example, we have entered www.devtech.com. When a partial address with no protocol or path specification is used, SiteSurfer assumes that the protocol is "http" and the path is "/". Thus SiteSurfer will resolve this address to http://www.devtech.com/. Press the Next button to continue.

You should now see four radio buttons: Direct, Proxy, Local mirror, and Local server. Each one of these options represents a method of retrieving data and building the index. Detailed descriptions of each build method are available.

Here we have chosen to index the site directly, which means SiteSurfer will go out onto the Internet and retrieve pages directly from the address we just entered a minute ago. Press the Next button to continue.

Next you are presented with a few choices for what kind of features to integrate with the SiteSurfer applet.

The More options button will display a special dialog for configuring many advanced features of SiteSurfer. For now, will we stick with the defaults, which means the SiteSurfer applet will not only support searching, but will have a sortable site index and a site map that presents a tree view of the site.

After pressing the Next button, SiteSurfer will present you with two options for how to crawl the site.

You may choose to index the entire site or first select which pages you want in the index. Here the latter options has been selected. This means that after the Next button is pressed, SiteSurfer will crawl the site and then present you with a list of all the pages it has found.

Each page may be individually selected or deselected, to include or exclude it from the final index. Once you have chosen which pages you want included, press the Next button to proceed to the next step.

The final panel requiring user input lets you choose where to place the index files, the applet, and the sample HTML pages for the applet. You may enter any directory in the filesystem. SiteSurfer will ask you whether to create a directory if it does not exist yet.

Finally, press the Finish button to let SiteSurfer complete indexing process and generate files in the chosen directory.

After SiteSurfer has completed all steps and saved the generated files, it will display a panel showing where the files have been stored, as well as if any problems were encountered--such as bad links in HTML files--and a short summary of what fields were indexed, such as titles or keywords.

From here you may Exit the program or press the View log button for more information about how this site was processed, including all the pages, error descriptions, and more helpful statistics. All done!