[Zope] external search engines (altavista, etc.)

[Brian Lloyd]

> > Can search engines such as AltaVista mine the information 
> out of a Zope
> > website.  I have seen responses to other questions that 
> there are ways
> > to use a search engine to search a Zope website, but can 
> the commercial
> > laces search the website.  It would be nice for other places to know
> > about things in your website, unless you want it to be private.
> 
>     Just for the record, I've seen several robots crawl 
> through my Zope sites
> and later found them indexed on the comercial engines.  So, 
> yeah, it works!

Just for the record, the main thing you need to watch out for
as far as search engines indexing your site is funny links that
make use of acquisition. A side effect of the way Acquisition
works is that an object can "acquire itself from itself" - in
other words a url like:

http://myserver.com/foo/foo/foo/foo/foo/foo/foo/foo/

...is perfectly valid (and will be found by Zope through Acquisition)
even though there is only really one top level foo object :) If foo
in this case happens to be a document, having a link like:

<a href="foo">...</a> 

in it will probably cause some search robots to lose their minds :)


Brian Lloyd        brian@digicool.com
Software Engineer  540.371.6909              
Digital Creations  http://www.digicool.com