Thunderstone Search Appliance Manual

Similarity Searching

The search script has a feature called "Find Similar" which allows a user to click on a search result record to find more pages within the database similar to that one. This feature may also be accessed from any web page by placing the appropriate URL on it. You may search for pages in your database that are similar to any other web page whether it's in the database or not. The URL for finding similar pages has the form shown below.

http://www.example.com/texis/search/similar.html?pr=default&ref=http://example.com/somepage.html

If the profile to be searched is "default" the pr=default& portion may be omitted:

ref=http://example.com/somepage.html

If the profile to be searched is anything other than "default" that must be specified instead of default:

pr=myprofile&ref=http://example.com/somepage.html

If the page to be located is the page the URL is on the ref=URL portion may be omitted:

/texis/search/similar.html
or
/texis/search/similar.html?pr=myprofile

The similar function will lookup the desired URL in the database or, if it's not in the database, fetch it from the webserver. It will then search the database looking for indexed pages similar to the specified page.

You could place a URL like this on all of your pages so users could, with one click, find all pages on your site similar in content to the one they were reading.