8.7 Indexing Dynamic Web Content

Much of the content on the World Wide Web is static HTML, which means that after a static Web page is created, it remains the same until someone updates it. By contrast, many newer Web pages are created by Web applications, including servlets, Java Server Pages (JSP), Common Gateway Interfaces (CGI), and Perl scripts, and are usually created in response to user input.

An example of dynamic Web content is an eCommerce Web page where items to be purchased are stored in a virtual shopping cart and the total cost is updated as users add or remove items from the shopping cart.

Because the content changes regularly, many search engines don’t index dynamic content.

QuickFinder includes the ability to index dynamic content. The URL of dynamic Web content typically includes a question mark (?). You can direct QuickFinder to index these URLs by setting the Crawl dynamic URLs option to Yes. You could then create a scheduled event that regenerates the specified indexes every few minutes.