Searching the HEP Web

Paper: 356
Session: D (talk)
Speaker: Lidinsky, William, Fermilab, Batavia
Keywords: networking, software tools, world-wide collaboration



Searching the HEP Web

Jeff J. Dingbaum
Fermi National Acclerator Laboratory
PO Box 500
Batavia, IL 60510

Abstract

Finding the right information is often critical to the success of a project,
whether it be researching a paper or finding the top quark. Since HEP
researchers are often scattered widely around the globe it is often
hard to find the correct information, even from members of your own
collaboration. With the advent of the world wide web as a large document
repository, more and more small groups are putting their documents onto
workgroup sized web servers. Realizing that locating the information
contained in a document, or even the document itself may be a time
consuming endeavor, the HEP Network Resource Center at Fermilab has been
indexing HEP world wide web servers.

HEPNRC is indexing many types of HEP-related, web-based documents from many
different web servers. By gathering indicies nightly, searches often
take no longer to complete than to display the results back to the user.
Prototype efforts with collaborations such as Babar, US-CMS, DART, and SDSS
have been very successful and operations are being expanded to include
experiments, major universities and even large HEP sites still lacking in
search technology. As a result of this project, someone can search several
HEP sites all from one central site. Documents types now indexed by the
HEPNRC spiders include text, html, and Adobe PDF.