Simple Web Indexing System For Humans (SWISH)

Definition - What does Simple Web Indexing System For Humans (SWISH) mean?

The Simple Web Indexing System for Humans (SWISH) is an open-source tool for indexing Web pages as well as other documents, including text, HTML and XML.

SWISH is used where there are large numbers of documents, including Web pages and other documents, that need to be indexed. The tool has ability to index emails, PDF, HTML, XML, Microsoft Word/Powerpoint/Excel, simple plain text and any other type of file that can be converted to XML or HTML text.

Techopedia explains Simple Web Indexing System For Humans (SWISH)

The Simple Web Indexing System for Humans - Enhanced (SWISH-e) is the descendant of SWISH. SWISH was developed by Kevin Hughes in 1994 and was eventually re-released under general public license as SWISH-E in 1996.

Features of SWISH include:

  • It can be used with relational databases such as MySQL for fast full-text searching.
  • It comes with a Web spider to index remote documents over HTTP
  • It supports fuzzy searching, phrase searching and wild card searching
  • It can return document summaries with each search
  • It has the ability to limit the searches to a certain part of the document or specific HTML and XML elements
  • It can make you aware of any structural errors in your XML and HTML documents
  • The index file can be ported from one platform to another - it is platform independent.

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