Searching

Searching is also pretty straightforward (on hindsight after spending a few days trying to get it to work), once you realize a few things.

Searching
(from Nutch Website)

To search you need to put the nutch war file into your servlet container. (If instead of downloading a Nutch release you checked the sources out of SVN, then you'll first need to build the war file, with the command ant war.)

Assuming you've unpacked Tomcat as ~/local/tomcat, then the Nutch war file may be installed with the commands:

rm -rf ~/local/tomcat/webapps/ROOT*
cp nutch*.war ~/local/tomcat/webapps/ROOT.war

Ok, this is the first time that I have used Tomcat or any similar tool which explains the fumbling. Anyway, I finally realized that the above 2 lines are only necessary if you want to start the Nutch search as the default application. So, the only thing you need to do is to copy the .war file to the Tomcat's webapps folder.

The above simply copies the .war file to the webapps folder without renaming.

The webapp finds its indexes in ./crawl, relative to where you start Tomcat, so use a command like:

~/local/tomcat/bin/catalina.sh start


If you did not place your crawl contents in crawl folder,
you will need to define the search directory.

1) First just start the Tomcat.


The .war file that you just copied to the
/tomcat_dir/webapps will be automatically
expanded, as evident from the image below. 


If you have named your .war file to
say, abc.war, then it will expand
to a abc folder.

2) Amend the nutch-site.xml file in your
tomcat_dir/webapps/exanded_dir/WEB-INF/classes
folder. So, for my case, I will locate
the file here:




This is the content of my nutch-site.xml file.
(note: this nutch-site.xml file is the one
located in the tomcat_dir and not the
one in the nutch_dir folder.)



So you just need to put in the path of your
crawl directory where the indexes and segments
are placed after the crawl.
In this case, my folder is called crawl.test3.


Then visit http://localhost:8080/
and have fun!

Note: If you are using other ports for Tomcat, please use
the corresponding port number.

For example, if port 8888 is used, the address
will be http://localhost:8888.
This will bring you to the ROOT
application. If you have not changed
anything in the original root folder, then
you will be at the Tomcat start page which looks
like this:


However, if you have changed the root folder
like this:

rm -rf ~/local/tomcat/webapps/ROOT*
cp nutch*.war ~/local/tomcat/webapps/ROOT.war

Then, the nutch search page will be the
root application.

For my example, my nutch search page
is at http://localhost:8080/nutch-0.9/
as shown in the below image.




Now, you can verify that your search works
by inputing the search queries. If there
are no hits when there should be, maybe
the search directory is not set correctly.
Or the problem may lie with the crawling part.

Have fun!