Webglimpse is the spider and manager for the files to be searched. In combination, they can work to index and search your own "corner" of the web, defined by the links you place on a starting page.

The folks at the University of Arizona who originally developed Glimpse have gone off to bigger & better things in many different directions, and work on Glimpse and Webglimpse has been taken over by a new community of developers. In 1997, Internet Workshop took over the responsibility of providing support and maintenance for Webglimpse, in exchange for a limited number of resale licenses. The commercial site is at Webglimpse.Net. However, all the code is still open source and free to educational institutions, government agencies and most nonprofits. To encourage interested developers, licensed commercial copies are also exchanged for development work and sometimes testing or doc-writing. Since then more developers have gotton involved, and there has been a need for coordination of efforts, in addition to just tech support and bug-fixes. So we hope this site and the various tools (so far, Bugzilla and cvsweb) will help.

Q1. Where can I get the most current version of glimpse/webglimpse?

A1. http://webglimpse.net/download.html. You will need to register first, then a username & password will be e-mailed to you automatically.

Q2. I get errors about syserrlist or xfree when compiling under Linux or FreeBSD.
A2. Do not use the configure script. Make sure you have glimpse 4.12.6 or above, and use the included Makefile.linux. You may have to edit some parameters for your system.

Q3. Everything works, except the links on my search results page are wrong (using Webglimpse).
A3. Edit the DocumentRoot setting in the .wgsiteconf file in the Webglimpse home directory. Also check the Aliases and UserDir settings, make sure you are using at least Webglimpse 1.7.7, and then reindex by running the wgreindex script in the archive directory.

Q4. I need to index filenames with spaces in them.
A5. See http://webglimpse.net/docs/howto_spacesinfilenames.html

Q5. Neighborhoods don't work, makenh hangs on retrieving some links, Webglimpse doesn't have support for HPUX or Irix, or other problems with Webglimpse.
A5. Upgrade to Webglimpse 1.7.6 or above.

Q6. Glimpse segfaults on merge, or on large indexes.
A6. Upgrade to Glimpse 4.12.6 or above, delete all your .glim* files and reindex from scratch. If segfaulting on large indexes, try both with and without the -M flag. Let us know if you have a reproducible case with the most recent version of Glimpse.

Glimpse was developed by Udi Manber, Sun Wu, and Burra Gopal.