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The search engine is a simple string-matching iterative routine written in perl. The original code came from a colleague (sensei Mike Stanger), who provided the basic perl shell. I made a LOT of modifications, and tweaks (including the ability to handle mixed case first letters, e-mail output of results, and restricted search counts). The code is very small, portable, and can be used to search virtually any sort of text file.

The database was constructed using the PAPYRUS Personal Bibliographic Database System, probably the best value for the dollar I've ever spent on a piece of software. It is very intuitive to use, extremely flexible (enough so that it only took me about 45 minutes to figure out how to create an HTML output format), and very fast. PAPYRUS let me easily create an HTML-coded output file with all of the reference information I specified, including keywords, which are now accesible through the search engine.

Oh..it hasn't escaped me that the guys at Yahoo started out by writing a simple bit of perl code to search indexed bookmark lists. The fact that they're now stinking rich does give me pause for thought. :-)