The SearchTools-Dev mailing list is a neutral discussion area for developers and programmers who are creating search engines for web sites and intranets. It is administered by Avi Rappoport of Search Tools Consulting.

Topics for discussion include open source code options, robot spiderering and web crawling, index compression, file format conversion, metadata indexing and searching, Boolean and Intranet search operators, index speed and size, stopwords, relevance ranking algorithms, stemming, categorized search results, search form and results page user interfaces, search log analysis, security, peer-to-peer search, and anything else that interests the participants.

It is a public list, currently at SearchTools-Dev at Topica.com. On request, anyone can subscribe and read the archives, so be sure that you do not post anything private or discreditable. The list mom says "be nice!"

This is a cooperative list designed for mutual benefit, and does not allow:

• flaming of people or postings
• excess criticism of competing products
• leaks of private information
• product sales pitches (except search engine development or utility tools information posted by the administrator)
• any attached or binary files

People who break these rules may be banned without further notice.

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