Can Google be used to search archives?
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Can Google Free Search be set up to use for searches of my Mailman archives? How would I go about it? I searched the list archives here but didn't find anything on the topic.
Also, the list in question is a list where archives are set up to be viewable only by current list members.
Bob
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Bob Bergey wrote:
If your archives were public, Google could crawl your archive and index it.
Because your archive is private, you cannot use Google to search the pages. Google knows nothing about mailman's authentication scheme and would be unable to access the archive pages so it could crawl them and index them. The other issue here is that Google's index is pretty much open to everyone, they have no way that I am aware of to restrict searches by domain so excerpts (and cached versions of the pages) from your private archives would become publicly accessible if a search matches one of your pages.
Which leads me to the next question... why not use something like htdig or namazu for searching your site? These can be integrated into mailman through a few patches and are relatively easy to set up.
Dragon
Venimus, Saltavimus, Bibimus (et naribus canium capti sumus)
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Bob Bergey wrote:
If your lists were set to be public then you could use the Google's "site:" keyword to search specifically within your domain.
site:yourdomainname.com your keywords here
http://www.google.com/intl/en/help/cheatsheet.html
-Ken
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/358f04f5f993066da926a0892f774c83.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
Bob Bergey wrote:
If your archives were public, Google could crawl your archive and index it.
Because your archive is private, you cannot use Google to search the pages. Google knows nothing about mailman's authentication scheme and would be unable to access the archive pages so it could crawl them and index them. The other issue here is that Google's index is pretty much open to everyone, they have no way that I am aware of to restrict searches by domain so excerpts (and cached versions of the pages) from your private archives would become publicly accessible if a search matches one of your pages.
Which leads me to the next question... why not use something like htdig or namazu for searching your site? These can be integrated into mailman through a few patches and are relatively easy to set up.
Dragon
Venimus, Saltavimus, Bibimus (et naribus canium capti sumus)
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/ac4140f94c4146861c83dcb47a7a168c.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
Bob Bergey wrote:
If your lists were set to be public then you could use the Google's "site:" keyword to search specifically within your domain.
site:yourdomainname.com your keywords here
http://www.google.com/intl/en/help/cheatsheet.html
-Ken
participants (3)
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Bob Bergey
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Dragon
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Ken MacFerrin