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Welcome at the Wiki of the Open Search Server project

This wiki page holds the documentation, along with various tricks and explanations. Being a wiki page, it is constantly being updated, fixed and polished. All constructive contributions are of course welcome!

The two main chunks of this documentation are the series of quick-start guides (which will teach you the basics), and the documentation proper (more in-depths resources).

In this wiki we refer to OpenSearchServer using the acronym OSS.

Interested parties can refer to the Trademarks notice for this document.

Contents 1 Getting started with OSS (the quick start guides) 1.1 Quick Start Guide part 1 - Installing OSS 1.2 Quick Start Guide part 2 - Inserting data into an index 1.3 Quick Start Guide part 3 - Querying data from an index 2 Documentation 2.1 Key OSS Concepts 2.2 Specific concepts and tasks

Getting started with OSS (the quick start guides)

These brief guides are intended to be read in sequence, and will teach you the basic operations needed to get things running. The goal of this quick start is not to demonstrate a full-featured web engine, but to give an overview of the most basic functionalities, and to allow interested parties to do some basic testing of the software.

Quick Start Guide part 1 - Installing OSS

1.1 - Checking the requirements

• What is required to run OSS ?

1.2 - Step-by-step installation guides, by OS

• Installing on Windows
• Installing on MacOS X
• Installing on Linux
• Installing on BSD

1.3 - Creating your first OSS index

• Creating an index

Quick Start Guide part 2 - Inserting data into an index

Using OSS, you can either crawl the World Wide Web, or documents. The latter can be accomplished in three ways - via the interface, via the APIs or via pre-formatted files. Check the relevant quick start guides below.

• Using the web crawler
  • Inserting patterns into the web crawler using the Pattern API
• Using the document crawler
  • Inserting documents through the web interface's crawler
  • Inserting documents through the APIs followed by Format of the XML files
  • Inserting prepared XML files

Quick Start Guide part 3 - Querying data from an index

OSS also offers two modes for querying - via the interface, or via the querying API. Check the relevant quick start guides below.

• Using the OSS interface to run queries
• Using the OSS Querying APIs (with example code snippets) followed by Format of the XML feedback

Now that you have been through all three parts of the Quick Start Guide, you know all the basic OSS skills.

Documentation

This section holds information about more elaborate operations using OSS, beyond the purview of the Quick Start Guides.

Key OSS Concepts

• Concepts pertaining to how the software itself works
• Concepts pertaining to how the search engine works

Specific concepts and tasks

1. Selectable attributes for a field Characteristics of OSS fields, whether standard or customised.
2. Selectable attributes for a query Basic characteristics of OSS queries, and how to set those parameters. Once this part is understood, you can learn more about:
   1. Selection of fields to be queried
   2. Querying fields as facets
   3. Managing snippets
   4. Sorting fields
   5. Filtering search results
   6. Collapsing fields
   7. Spellcheck settings
3. Securing your OSS Basic prevention of unwanted access to OSS indices and other data
4. Syntax of the OSS queries
5. Using the synonyms recognition function