Creating a Catalog and Search Page for a Web Domain

Last month, I went over some of the basics of Microsoft Index Server. I showed you how the default Web catalog is created, what it does, and how you can add and remove directories from its scope. The Microsoft Management Console (MMC) Index Server Services (ISS) snap-in lets you add directories to existing catalogs and create new catalogs. Index Server also has a set of HTML administration pages that give you a wide range of virtual root information and index statistics on the default Web catalog. Also, several example search pages exist that range from basic to complex Microsoft SQL Server ad hoc query builders that you can use as templates for building search pages.

This month, I build on the information in last month's article. I show you how to

Building a Web Catalog
Before you begin building a Web catalog, you must first open the IIS and Index Server snap-ins. You can open the IIS snap-in in MMC by choosing Start, Programs, Windows NT 4.0 Option Pack, Microsoft Internet Information Server, Internet Service Manager. To open the Index Server snap-in, choose Start, Programs, Windows NT 4.0 Option Pack, Microsoft Index Server, Index Server Manager. The Index Server snap-in opens in MMC. Next, choose Stop from the Action menu to stop Index Server. (If you've upgraded to Index Server 2.0 and MMC 1.1, you administer Index Server from its instance in MMC, as I do in this article.) Index Server's short name in the system is Content Index (CI), so the snap-in is called Ciadmin. You'll see references to CI in your event logs every time Index Server updates an index.

To begin catalog building, right-click Index Server on Local Machine and select New, Catalog, as Figure 1 shows. The Add Catalog dialog box, which Figure 2 shows, appears. Enter a name for your new catalog, and select a directory location in which to store the catalog. This directory is important because the CI internal parameters use the directory, not the catalog name, for searches. When you enter the information and click OK, you see a message that the catalog will remain offline until you restart Index Server. After you restart Index Server, the catalog entry appears in Ciadmin. The problem is that by default, the catalog is pointing at (tracking) the default Web site on the server machine, just like the Web catalog.

To change the Web domain that the catalog is tracking, right-click the new catalog and select Properties. Choose the Web tab, which Figure 3 shows. By default, the Track Virtual Roots check box, and the default Web site are selected. Click the drop-down list box, and select the virtual root of your choice. The catalog Properties dialog box contains two other tabs—Location and Generation. When you choose the Location tab, you can't change the location of the catalog. You must delete the catalog and recreate it if you want to change its location.

The Generation tab, which Figure 4 shows, lets you specify whether you want to filter files with unknown extensions. If you select the Filter Files with unknown extensions check box, the Indexer ignores files that have extensions you haven't specified. If this check box is clear, the Indexer attempts to index every file it finds in every directory in the scope. The other option on this tab is Generate characterizations. Characterizations (also called abstracts) are the bit of text (of maximum size) that appears under the document title. Index Server draws this text from different places depending on the document filter you're using. For example, in an .html document, the filter populates the characterization from the Description metatag. If no description metatag exists, then the results can be unpredictable depending on the actual HTML in the document. In general, if the document property or HTML element doesn't exist, the Indexer simply takes the maximum number of characters from the beginning of the document. Similarly, Index Server takes the title from the