Glimpse

Glimpse, which stands for GLobal IMPlicit SEarch, is a full-text indexing mechanism developed by a research team at the University of Arizona lead by Dr. Udi Manber. There is a Glimpse home page at the University of Arizona with a wealth of (mostly technical) information about Glimpse (note that you do not need to read the technical details in order to use Glimpse indexing at WebCom; merely follow the instructions for using Glimpse at WebCom).

The Glimpse system allows you to create a cross-index by word of all the files in a directory as well as all of the files in the directory's sub-directories, recursively. After having created a Glimpse index of a directory tree or sub-tree, the Glimpse system allows you to rapidly (almost instantly) locate all files containing a given word or group of words. Glimpse can locate all matching files, and, if you like, display each line in each qualifying file which contains the match.

The strengths of the Glimpse system are:

• It produces very small indexes (as little as 2% the size of the information encompassed by the index).
• It searches very rapidly (it can search dozens of megabytes of text in seconds flat).
• It provides much power and flexibility both in how the index is created as well as in how the index is searched.

Glimpse is a UNIX command-line tool, and WebCom server account holders do not have access to the UNIX shell. However, a fill-out form interface to the Glimpse facility is provided to allow WebCom customers to very easily create Glimpse index(es) of their WebCom files.