What is Search?

Search stands for Summary Object Interchange Format. It is a syntax that can be used in numerous situations. In particular, it is used to describe resource descriptions (RDs) in the search engine database.

The Search format is a basic attribute-value format. Search files look like text but should be treated as binary data and edited with care. Search files contain tabs, and many editors will convert tabs to spaces and corrupt the file. You can use Search-manipulation functions to create and modify Search objects so you do not have to write and edit them manually.

The following sample Search describes a document, whose title is “Rescuing English Springer Spaniels”, whose author is “Jocelyn Becker” and whose URL is

http://www.siroe.com/~jocelyn/resdogs/index.html:

@DOCUMENT { http://www.siroe.com/~jocelyn/resdogs/index.html
    title{34}: Rescuing English Springer Spaniels
    author{14}: Jocelyn Becker
}

Each Search object has a schema-name (or template type) and an associated URL, and it contains a list of attribute-value pairs. In this case, the schema name is @DOCUMENT, which indicates this resource is a document. Title and author are both attribute names, and you can see that each attribute has a value.