[MacPerl-WebCGI] Search Engine Questions

[Richard Gordon <maccgi@bellsouth.net>]

I've run into a couple of puzzles in the course of working on a web 
site search engine:

1. First, I wound up having to change the method from POST to GET in 
order to make Apache happy with the output of my search query form. 
There wasn't anything weird about the form- you just enter the search 
text, select the preferred boolean, and set a case sensitivity 
preference, and submit. With POST, I was reading STDIN to a variable, 
then parsing, but kept getting internal server error messages that 
didn't really say much. Naturally, script ran fine from the command 
line in telnet. When I changed the method to GET and put QUERY_STRING 
into a variable for parsing, it worked as expected. What is the deal 
and why should I care whether I use POST to begin with?

2. Second, it's very likely that a user is going to turn up more than 
20-30 hits when a search occurs and I would like to provide an option 
to limit the number of hits displayed per page. Looking at some of 
the portals and trying to guess how they approach this has not been 
very productive and I was wondering if anyone has either figured this 
out? Do you write the first 20 (or whatever) to STDOUT, then start 
writing to temporary text files? That sounds like it would really 
suck for various reasons, not the least of which is getting rid of 
all those files at some point, but I don't know. Any thoughts?

Richard Gordon
--------------------
Gordon Consulting & Design
Database Design/Scripting Languages
mailto://maccgi@bellsouth.net
770.565.8267

==== Want to unsubscribe from this list?
==== Send mail with body "unsubscribe" to macperl-webcgi-request@macperl.org