Principia Cybernetica Web now allows full-text search

Francis Heylighen (fheyligh@VNET3.VUB.AC.BE)
Thu, 19 Jan 1995 18:53:14 +0300


I have cleaned up the searchable index interface of PCP Web, and, most
importantly, added the possibility to search PCP nodes in full (not just
the titles). It seems to work better than expected (I would have
implemented it much earlier if I knew it would be so fast). It orders the
results according to the number of times the search term appears in a node.
Now, people who are looking for "CYBSYS-L" or "ecosystem" or other terms
that don't have a full node devoted to them, but which are mentioned
somewhere, will no longer be frustrated.

The new index is available at http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Index.html (as well
as at the old address: Index.ind). Please try it out, and let me know what
you think. Below I include the instructions.

Francis

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Full-text search

If your title search does not produce any results, you may try the
full-text search:

This searches through the text (not titles or other fields) of all nodes
in the Principia Cybernetica Web. It does not include the "primitive
concepts", the Glossary on Cybernetics and Systems Theory, the files from
our FTP-archive, or the "related resources".

Instructions

Full-text search will accept words without the ending characters, but not
without initial characters. E.g. 'system' will find "systemic", and
"Systems", but not "metasystem". It does not accept Boolean combinations.
Spaces between words will be interpreted as an implied "and", so 'systems
theory' will find all nodes that have both "systems" and "theory" somewhere
in their text (perhaps thousands of characters apart).

Be careful with full-text search: if you enter common strings, such as
'system' or 'cyber', you are likely to get thousands of hits, most of which
have little relevance to your query, and this may take so long that the
server times out.

_______________________________________________________________________
Dr. Francis Heylighen Systems Researcher
PO, Free University of Brussels, Pleinlaan 2, B -1050 Brussels, Belgium
Phone: +32-2-629 25 25; Fax: +32-2-629 24 89 (**new numbers!)
Email:fheyligh@vnet3.vub.ac.be; URL: http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HEYL.html