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The Indexing Service Companion

The Indexing Service Companion is a utility I have created that allows Microsoft Index Server or Indexing Services to index content from remote websites and ODBC databases. It is available for purchase through my business website. An evaluation version is also available.

The Problem

The Windows Indexing Service is a great product! On the administrative side of things, it is easy to install, performance is good, and once installed maintenance tasks are minimal. The development of search applications using ASP is also made fairly straightforward through the use of the Query and Utility server components.

The main limitation of the Indexing Service is that it can really only be used to index content hosted on servers on the same machine or network as the machine hosting the Indexing Service service. Although it is possible to set up a share to a Unix/Linux webserver using a file sharing solution such as SAMBA, this isn't always satisfactory because the Indexing Service is not case sensitive with respect to filenames, so this can cause problems when displaying search results.

Another issue is that it can be a chore to prevent Indexing Service from indexing certain content on a server. Unlike a web robot, it has no concept of the Robots Exclusion Standard specification (i.e. robots.txt files) and is unaffected by the 'robots' meta tag.

The Solution

Retrieving and indexing content from a web server by use of a web robot is the solution. The web robot is able to mimic a web browser, starting at one page in the site and traversing the links in the site until it has retrieved all of the pages of the site. The robot will potentially be able to retrieve content from any webserver, regardless of the platform it is hosted on. Because the Indexing Service has no web crawling facilities of its own, an add-on is required to accomplish the task. Two products that allow you to do this are Microsoft's Site Server 3.0 and the author's own Indexing Service Companion.

Microsoft Site Server 3.0

Microsoft's Site Server 3.0 software suite has a Search application that enhances the Windows Indexing Service by allowing you to (amongst other things) retrieve and index content from remote websites using an integrated web robot. Unfortunately Site Server 3.0 Search has a few shortcomings, not least of which is that the product is no longer in active development:

• Site Server 3.0 isn't the easiest of applications to install.
• The product wasn't really designed for Windows 2000 Server.
• It isn't very useful if your websites are hosted by a third party, and they don't have Site Server 3.0 installed.
• Site Server 3.0 costs a lot of money, which cannot always be justified if you only want to use the Search application of the software suite.

Indexing Service Companion

The Indexing Service Companion is the cost effective method of retrieving content from remote webservers for Indexing Service to index. Furthermore it also allows retrieval of content from ODBC databases which can be subsequently indexed by the Indexing Service.

Features

The main features of the Indexing Service Companion are:

• Enables the Indexing Service to allow searching of potentially any web server or ODBC compliant database.

• Integrated web robot extracts content from websites. Includes support for robots.txt files and robots meta tags. Robot can negotiate sites using HTML Frames. Optional mode allows QueryStrings to be treated as distinct URLs (e.g. treat http://www.aspalliance.com/brettb/WebJobMarket.asp?Skill=ASP as being a distinct URL from http://www.aspalliance.com/brettb/WebJobMarket.asp?Skill=JSP).

• Ability to retrieve binary files from servers, including Adobe Acrobat PDF, Microsoft Office documents and even images.

• Support for full or incremental project updates of both web and database content, meaning that the Indexing Service only has to re-index content that has changed.

• Optional automatic uploading of saved content to a FTP site.

• Configuration of the Indexing Service Companion is through the editing of a plain text configuration file.

• Indexing Service Companion can be run from the command line, and scheduled using the Windows Task Scheduler.

• Supports crawling of websites using HTTP Basic Authentication or NTLM authentication (Windows integrated security).

• Supports crawling of secure websites that use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL).

• Includes sample code showing how to use the Indexing Service Companion with Index Server/Indexing Service on ASP.NET (C# and VB.NET). Display your search results in DataGrids, Repeaters and other Web Form components.

• Facility for creating a site summary page that can be used to optimise sites for search engines, by showing what keywords are used on a site, the <title> tags used by each page etc. The site summary page shows:
  • The top 40 most used keywords listed in the keywords meta tags in all of the pages crawled.
  • The body of the summary page contains the following from the pages encountered in the web crawl:
    • A list of page titles.
    • A list of page headings (H1 to H3 inclusive).
    • A list of bold (and strong) text.
    • A list of external hyperlinks in the site.
    • A list of italicised text.
    • A selection of relevant paragraph text. Paragraphs are assumed to be relevant if they contain one or more of the 40 most frequently used keywords.
    • A list of page description meta tags.
    • A list of page keywords.
    • A list of page description meta tags hyperlinked back to the URL from which each description was extracted.
    • A list of page keywords hyperlinked back to the URL from which it was extracted.

• Full reporting of activity to an external plain text log file.

• Flexible output options mean that administrative access to Indexing Service is not necessarily required.

• Fully documented VBScript examples show how to make use of the Indexing Service Companion in ASP pages.

• Detailed documentation in Microsoft's HTML Help format.

• Fully documented Perl 5 source code (precompiled Windows executable version is also supplied; Perl is not required).

• Access to product updates and technical support.

The Indexing Service Companion contains fully searchable documentation in Microsoft's HTML Help format.

System Requirements

The Indexing Service Companion can be used on a machine running Microsoft Windows 95 or any subsequent version of Windows. Windows NT 4.0 or Windows 2000 is recommended.

It also (of course) requires a server running either Index Server on Windows NT 4.0 Server, or the Indexing Service on Windows 2000 onwards. Note that Indexing Service Companion does not have to be run from the machine on which the Indexing Service is installed.

Configuring and Running the Indexing Service Companion

The Indexing Service Companion executable file or Perl script needs to be run from the Windows command line. Fortunately there is only a single mandatory parameter, which tells the script which configuration file to use. So to run the Indexing Service Companion for the Sample Project, an MSDOS Command Prompt is opened in the folder where the Indexing Service Companion files are installed installed and the following is typed:

IndexServerCompanion.exe --c="SampleProject/SampleProject.ini"

It is of course possible to run the Indexing Service Companion from .bat scripts, which can then be scheduled using the AT command or the Windows Task Scheduler. This makes it straightforward to update the Indexing Service's index of website and database content at specific times and frequencies.

The configuration file (in this instance it is called SampleProject.ini) is a plain text file containing a number of settings.

• View a sample configuration file.

The Indexing Service Companion is supplied with full documentation in Microsoft's HTML Help format that describes each of the configuration settings.

When the script is run, the Indexing Service Companion will display details of its status in the Command Prompt window. A detailed log file is also created.

• View a sample log file.

How the Indexing Service Companion Works

The Indexing Service Companion contains a fully functional web robot that is able to extract the content from all of the required pages of the specified website. It contains support for the Robots Exclusion Standard specification, and support for the robots meta tag contained within individual pages. Each file extracted from the website is modified to contain a special meta tag that give the original URL (for web content). It is then saved to disk from where it can be indexed by the Indexing Service. The contents of these special meta tags can then be used by the ASP page displaying the results of a web search, so that clicking on a search result item will display the original URL. Unfortunately Indexing Service will not allow you to retrieve the content from custom meta tags without making a minor modification in the Indexing Service's Microsoft Management Console (MMC), so there is also a special mode in the Indexing Service Companion that appends the original URL into the page's HTML <title> tag.

The Indexing Service Companion is also able to index content from database tables, queries (Microsoft Access) and stored procedures (SQL Server). Database connectivity is achieved through the use of ODBC, so potentially any type of database that has an ODBC driver is supported.

Searching Web Content with the Indexing Service Companion

Indexing Service Companion allows content from remote websites to be retrieved and consequently indexed by Indexing Service. A working example of this search facility is available.

This is a search page running on Internet Information Services 5.0 (Windows 2000 Server) that allows you to search my ASPAlliance site (including the article you are presently reading!), together with the articles I have written for Ariadne.ac.uk and ASPToday.com. Since I don't have administrative access to the Indexing Service on the machine hosting the search page, I have used the feature of the Indexing Service Companion that allows the document's original URL to be appended to the original title. For example the <title> tag of the ASPToday article "ASP Documentation Systems" at http://asptoday.com/content.asp?id=1435 is modified in the file saved to read:

<title>ISC_URL=http://asptoday.com/content.asp?id=1435 ASP Documentation Systems</title>

The URL and original title are separated by a tab character. The search results page then contains a small piece of ASP code to split this title back into the article's URL and original title.

The ASP code for the sample search page may be seen below:

• View sample ASP code.

Searching Databases with the Indexing Service Companion

The Indexing Service Companion is able to index content from database tables, queries (Microsoft Access) and stored procedures (SQL Server). It is of course entirely possible to search databases using Structured Query Language (SQL), but by making use of Index Server Companion, it is a lot more straightforward to integrate database searches with Indexing Service search results from web page searches. There are also other advantages: Index Server contains sophisticated pattern matching, and it is often lot faster at returning search results than an equivalent SQL statement would be when using a database such as Microsoft Access.

Indexing Service Companion is able to retrieve the rows of a specified database table and make an HTML file containing the data from a specific database row. Indexing Service can then be used to index the HTML files, and it is possible to extract the details of the table and row from which the data originated so that the search results page can be modified to point to the original database data. A sample page produced from the SQL Server sample pubs database is shown below:

<html>
<head>
<meta name="ISC_title_id" content="MC2222">
<meta name="ISC_title" content="Silicon Valley Gastronomic Treats">
<meta name="ISC_type" content="mod_cook ">
<meta name="ISC_price" content="19.99">
<meta name="ISC_pubdate" content="6/9/1991 12:00:00 AM">
<meta name="ISC_notes" content="Favorite recipes for quick, easy, and elegant meals.">
<meta name="description" content="Favorite recipes for quick, easy, and elegant meals."></head>
<title>Silicon Valley Gastronomic Treats</title>
<body>
</body>
</html>

In this example, the title field is optionally used to give the page a title, and the notes field is used for the description meta tag.

Each of the custom ISC_ prefixed meta tags can be queried using the Indexing Service, although to retrieve their contents a minor configuration change to the Windows Indexing Service is required. It is straightforward to create a page which for example, will return the records where the value of the ISC_type meta tag is "mod_cook".

The Indexing Service Companion can also modify the HTML's <title> tag to include the table name and row ID, e.g.:

<title>ISC_Table=titles ISC_KeyField=title_id ISC_RowNumber=MC2222 Silicon Valley Gastronomic Treats</title>

Summary

The Indexing Service Companion allows Microsoft's Indexing Service to index content from remote websites and ODBC databases, making it a cost effective way of significantly extending the functionality of the Windows Indexing Service.

Downloads

• Index Server Companion Evaluation Version (528K zip file; includes documentation and code samples).

• Purchase the Indexing Service Companion

• Special offers on both Indexing Service Companion and the ASP Documentation Tool.

Further information

• The Microsoft Site Server Search Facility.

• Searching Indexing Service With ASP. Introductory guide to using the Windows Indexing Service from ASP.

• More about Searching Indexing Service With ASP. More advise and source code.

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