SSServer and Subject Search Server are trademarks of Kryloff Technologies, Inc.
SSServer is a powerful search tool that automates the retrieval and selection of all the useful information available on your Web Site. SSServer allows to:
The general search procedure is as follows:
Below is an example form to be included in one or several HTML documents on your Web server. You may copy and paste this form into a temporary HTML document, then modify or translate its contents into another language (the form layout has been simplified).
Here's this search form contents in HTML format (unnecessary tags excluded):
<!-- To be included within the <body> tag of your HTML files --> <FORM ACTION="cgi-bin/ssserver" METHOD="POST"> <INPUT TYPE="HIDDEN" NAME="CONFIG" VALUE="ssserver.ini"> Search on this site is provided by <a href="http://www.kryltech.com">Kryloff Technologies, Inc.</a> <!-- Do not remove the reference to Kryloff Technologies, Inc. --> Search phrase: <INPUT TYPE="TEXT" NAME="QUERY" SIZE="72" MAXLENGTH="255" VALUE=""> The rest of the FORM elements given below are optional; the default values are shown on the form and can be changed by modifying the configuration file "ssserver.ini":<HR> Use search method: <INPUT TYPE="RADIO" NAME="METHOD" VALUE="FUZZY" CHECKED>Subject Search (smart fuzzy) <INPUT TYPE="RADIO" NAME="METHOD" VALUE="EXACT">Literal Search (exact) Report to you with: <SELECT NAME="QUOTES"> <OPTION>10 <OPTION SELECTED>25 <OPTION>50 <OPTION>100 <OPTION>250 <OPTION>500 <OPTION>1000 </SELECT> most relevant hits Each quotation contains: <SELECT NAME="QUOTESIZE"> <OPTION>100 <OPTION>500 <OPTION SELECTED>1000 <OPTION>2500 <OPTION>5000 </SELECT> characters Extract no more than: <SELECT NAME="QUOTESPERDOC"> <OPTION>1 <OPTION>2 <OPTION>3 <OPTION>4 <OPTION SELECTED>5 <OPTION>6 <OPTION>7 <OPTION>8 <OPTION>9 <OPTION>10 <OPTION>11 <OPTION>12 <OPTION>13 <OPTION>14 <OPTION>15 </SELECT> quotations from the same document (relevant if the Subject Search method is selected) Include quotes with the relevancy: <SELECT NAME="RELEVANCY"> <OPTION>10 <OPTION>20 <OPTION>30 <OPTION SELECTED>40 <OPTION>50 <OPTION>60 <OPTION>70 <OPTION>80 <OPTION>90 <OPTION>100 </SELECT> (%) or higher (Subject Search only) Search for: <SELECT NAME="TERMS"> <OPTION VALUE="ANY">for any term <OPTION VALUE="ALL" SELECTED>for all terms <OPTION VALUE="PHRASE">as a phrase </SELECT> (Literal Search only) Case sensitiveness: <SELECT NAME="CASE"> <OPTION VALUE="INSENSITIVE" SELECTED>case insensitive <OPTION VALUE="SENSITIVE">case sensitive </SELECT> (Literal Search only) <INPUT TYPE="SUBMIT" NAME="SEARCH" VALUE="Search"> <INPUT TYPE="SUBMIT" NAME="SITEMAP" VALUE="Site Map"> <INPUT TYPE="SUBMIT" NAME="HELP" VALUE="Help"> </FORM> |
SSServer processes query strings posted on the application by a remote browser when the user presses any of the SUBMIT buttons on the search query form. The query string should contain all or any of the following parameters:
QUERY=<query string>
CONFIG=<configuration file name>
TEMPLATE=<search form template file name>
LANGUAGE=<language dictionary file name>
FILELIST=<name of the file, which lists files/directories to be searched>
HELPFILE=<name of the End-User Help file>
HEADER=<name of the file containing the heading for SSServer reports>
FOOTER=<name of the footer file for SSServer reports>
SITEROOTURL=<your Web server's Internet address>
WORKDIR=<directory, in which SSServer keeps temporary and work files>
ACTION=<action>
QUOTES=<number of quotes to generate>
QUOTESIZE=<quotation size>
QUOTESPERDOC=<max. number of quotes that can be extracted from the same file>
METHOD=<search method>
RELEVANCY=<relevancy in the range 0-100>
TERMS=<Literal Search option>
CASE=<Literal Search option>
ALLOWSITEMAP=<YES or NO>
The description of each of the parameters follows:
This file contains all or any of the query string parameters (except for the CONFIG option, again: recursion is not allowed). Each parameter occupies one line. Example:
TEMPLATE=template.txt LANGUAGE=English.ssl FILELIST=filelist.txt HELPFILE=help.htm HEADER=header.txt FOOTER=footer.txt SITEROOTURL=http://www.mycompany.com WORKDIR=workdir/ ALLOWSITEMAP=NO |
It is not usually necessary to include such parameters as QUOTES or ACTION because they are primarily selected by site visitors. However, if you have simplified the Search Query form and some of the options are not now selectable by users, the default values for them may be set in the configuration file. For example: the statement METHOD=FUZZY in the configuration file instructs SSServer to use the Subject Search Method.
The default value for the CONFIG parameter is not defined, e.g.
SSServer does not look for or read configuration files automatically.
This means that in order to reassign the default values for query string
parameters, your search query form should contain a reference to the
configuration file; this reference should be present as the very first and
invisible statement in the search query form. For example:
<INPUT TYPE="HIDDEN" NAME="CONFIG" VALUE="ssserver.ini">
Basically, configuration file is used to define search string parameters that are common to all queries and cannot be changed by site visitors. For example, if a number of pages on your server are in Latin, and you want your visitors to be able to search in this language, the configuration file for the corresponding Search in Latin form should contain the statement: "LANGUAGE=Latin.ssl". Apart from assigning the defaults, you may use configuration files to prevent visitors from obtaining your site map. Just include the statement "ALLOWSITEMAP=No" in it.
Important: Your visitors should enter questions in the language of your
Web site documents and also in the same encoding if your language
allows using different coding tables. You should keep in mind that SSServer
does not translate questions into English nor does it perform encoding of any
sort. If your Web page contains documents in more than one language, you may
create several search forms for each group as is described in the section
Frequently Asked Questions, question 11.
See also: Multi-language
support in Kryloff Technologies' products.
This file contains a sequence of paired lines, which should follow right
after each other. Each pair can be either:
FILE=<local file name> URL=<Internet address of this file> or DIR=<name of the local directory> URL=<Internet address of this directory>The pairs point out a local file or a directory on your Web server and a URL which corresponds to the file or directory.
Example file filelist.txt:
Dir=/usr/local/www/data URL=http://www.kryltech.com/ Dir=/usr/local/www/data/download URL=http://www.kryltech.com/download/ File=/usr/local/www/data/samples/getid.htm URL=http://www.kryltech.com/samples/getid.htm |
The Header parameter specifies the file whose contents will be placed on top of each SSServer report. This file must contain the <HTML> and <BODY> tags. The default value for this option is header.txt; the file path is relative to ssserverdata subdirectory of the directory, in which ssserver has been installed.
Example file header.txt:
<html> <head> <title>SSServer(TM) Search Results</title> <!-- the STYLE tag below is placed here to minimize space occupied by quotations; you may remove it if it does not match the style that you use in other documents on your site. --> <STYLE TYPE="TEXT/CSS"><!-- H1,H2,H3 {font-size:14pt; margin:0pt} H4,H5,H6,P {margin:0pt} UL,OL,DL {margin-top:0pt; margin-bottom:0pt} --></STYLE> </head> <body BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" LINK="#0000FF" ALINK="#FF0000" VLINK="#990099" TOPMARGIN=2 LEFTMARGIN=4 MARGINHEIGHT=2 MARGINWIDTH=4> |
Example (file footer.txt):
<!-- place here other end-tags if required --> </body> </html> |
For example, when ssserver detects the "SEARCH=something" substring in the query string, it searches for data.
SSServer supports two types of searches: Subject Search and Literal Search. Developed by Kryloff Technologies, Inc., the Subject Search method is the intelligent and the most powerful way of information retrieval. The core Subject Search technique is also used in the rest of Kryloff Technologies' products known as Subject Search Suite. This method accepts natural language enquiries and is used by default, so it is unlikely that you would need to change it.
In addition to Subject Search, SSServer supports the traditional Literal Search approach. Visitors can use this method while looking for digits, number, names, etc. Using this method, SSServer extracts quotations "as is". Unlike to the Subject Search approach, if a user is looking for "John Griffiths" on your pages, Literal Search method does not select "Jon Griffit". This feature can be also quite useful in a number of cases, so it is recommended that you allow visitors to use both search methods: do not remove the corresponding radio-buttons from the search query form unless your documents do not have enough space.
Afrikaans Bulgarian Catalan Chinese (Traditional Big5 encoding) Czech Danish Dutch (standard and Belgian) English (all dialects) Estonian Finnish French (all dialects) German (all dialects) Greek (standard) Greek (Latin encoding) Hebrew Hungarian Icelandic Indonesian Irish Italian (standard and Swiss) Japanese (Shift-JIS encoding) Japanese (EUC encoding) Korean (EUC encoding) Latin Latvian Lithuanian Norwegian (Bokmal and Nynorsk) Polish Portuguese (standard and Brazilian) Romanian Russian (Windows encoding) Russian (KOI-8 encoding) Slovak Spanish (all dialects) Swedish Turkish |
Since Kryloff Technologies is constantly improving its Muli-Language Support, it is recommended that you visit our Muli-Language Support Page to obtain additional languages dictionaries if your language is not yet listed above.
Even in the case when your Web site is hosted on a remote computer and you do not have permission to add the package to the system, you can still properly install and use SSServer. Obviously, the best and the easiest way is to ask your Web administrator to do it. But, if you have remote access to your Web server (typically, via FTP), you can do it yourself! Just extract the original SSServer archive into a temporary directory on your "home" PC, which may be running any operating system, not obligatory FreeBSD.
Then locate SSServer files in the www/cgi-bin subdirectory and upload them to your Web server (including the ssserverdata subdirectory). Make sure that the Web server application can execute files from the directory, in which you have uploaded the SSServer files. Upon completing these steps, you may use your web browser to run SSServer configuration utility sssconf located in the ssserverdata subdirectory. Finally, when configuring SSServer is finished, your visitors will be able to use the search form and search your site!
SSServer v1.0 is able to search files written in Hyper-Text Markup language as well as standard ASCII text files. File names do not obligatory have to end up with ".HTM", ".HTML" or ".TXT" extension: the application automatically detects the type of each file it processes.
Despite the fact that SSServer does not internally support other file types, you may still make it process files written under ANY data storage format such as Rich Text Format (.RTF), Portable Data Format (.PDF), etc. For each "external" file you may create a corresponding text file containing just the textual information of the original one. Then, edit the SSServer File List (usually, it is the file ssserverdata/filelist.txt), and replace the local "external" file name with the name of its textual copy. After these changes, SSServer will search for queries in text files while supply its findings with the references to the original ones!
Example: say your Web site contains the file ExternalFile.RTF in Rich Text Format and you want SSServer to search in it as well. Do the following:
... FILE=ExternalFile.RTF URL=http://www.mysiteurl.com/ExternalFile.RTF ... |
... FILE=ExternalFile.TXT URL=http://www.mysiteurl.com/ExternalFile.RTF ... |
This "trick" makes SSServer search the file ExternalFile.TXT and extract quotations from it but then include the link to the original file http://www.mysiteurl.com/ExternalFile.RTF in the resulting reports!
To create text files, you may use our GetText utility available for free downloading at http://www.kryltech.com/freestf.htm
SSServer functions under the following environment:
SSServer automatically builds file indexes (or deletes them if required) in its working directory. If some of your documents have been modified, SSServer automatically rebuilds the corresponding index files. The only case you should be careful of is the situation when you delete documents from your Web server. If, having deleted some document, you do not also delete the corresponding "FILE=" statement in the file list, SSServer starts generating a warning message "Error reading file XXX" in each report.
Important: To prevent your visitors from seeing error messages, it is strongly recommended that you issue at least one query right after deleting any files or modifying SSServer configuration files (filelist.txt, ssserver.ini or template.txt). If you do not see any error messages in the report, all changes have been done correctly and your visitors will not see any error or warning messages either.
If you issue a query for the very first time, it may take a while as none of your documents have been indexed yet. All subsequent searches are done much faster. Index files occupy approximately as much space as the original documents, so make sure that there is enough disk space on the drive in which you have installed SSServer.
Other possible SSServer messages are described in section: Troubleshooting and Frequently Asked Questions: Instruction for Web Masters
Developer (manufacturer) is Kryloff Technologies, Inc.