[Mailman-Users] Can Google be used to search archives?

[Dragon]

Bob Bergey wrote:
>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.
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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

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