Chapter 19: Integrating Microsoft Index Server

As with a book, indexing serves a crucial purpose in a Web environment. If your web site contains more than a handful of pages, it can be difficult for visitors to quickly find information about a particular topic. For example, on a software support title, visitors may need help installing a particular component. Instead of coursing through a labyrinth of menu hyperlinks to locate the relevant support page, many users would probably find it easier to specify what they're looking for, and to get a list of matching pages.

The need to provide this support increases as the manageability of the desired information decreases. Imagine, for example, a situation in which a newspaper wants to provide users with the ability to retrieve stories from archive. Because it's impossible to anticipate the course of a user's interest, you simply can't use a menu of hyperlinks to lead a visitor through this exercise. You have to build in search capabilities, and the less the user is required to know about the mechanics of the search, the better.

The Microsoft Index Server allows you to make your site's content available to web searches. Using a background application that maintains one or more on-disk catalogs, the Index Server makes it possible for you to present your clients with sophisticated query options, and to determine in detail how the results of a search are presented to your clients.

In this chapter, we'll review the architecture of the Index Server, and examine each of these querying approaches in turn. Specifically, we'll look at:

An overview of the Index Server, to see its architecture and capabilities, including the kinds of documents it stores, the kinds of information it indexes, and the kinds of queries we can perform.
An introduction to static querying, to see how we can combine Internet Data Query (IDQ), HTML, and HTX files to perform fast and easily configured searches without writing ASP code.
An introduction to the new Query
and Utility
objects, which provide us with the ability to describe and execute a query, and get back an ADO Recordset
that contains the query's results.
A brief look at how we can use ActiveX Data Objects (first introduced in Chapter 7) to query Index Server just as we would query any other database.

Before we do, however, we should be precise regarding what this chapter is intended to achieve. This chapter is not intended to be an exhaustive treatment of the Index Server. Indeed, the more you learn about the Index Server, the more you realize that it's a universe of its own, justifying its own book-length treatment. The treatment you'll get here is intended simply to introduce you to the key concepts defined by the Index Server, and to provide a survey of the various ways in which you can query the Index Server and present query results.