WWW94: free text searches in the web

presented by christian neuss and stefanie höfling, frauenhofer institute, germany

the authors presented a search engine to perform free text searches on web archives with the following features:

• keywords and boolean expressions:
  search expressions use UNIX style syntax :-( and can be combined using AND and OR operators.

• thesaurus:
  the built-in thesaurus allows search operations using synonyms to extend the capabilities of queries.

• document hierarchies:
  queries can be refined by using URLs.

• fault tolerant searches:
  by implementing the levenshtein algorithm (distance between two words, as the weighted sum over the number of character deletions, insertions and changes needed to transform one word into another) the search engine is capable to overcome misspelt words and to find word variants.

this paper is available on the web.