Reading a Microsoft Word Document

[devised]

Is it possible to use ASP to:

1. search a directory for Word documents
2. scan the Word documents that were found for a desired keyword
3. return the path of the word documents containing the keyword

It will only be searching for files on the local network.

Or does anyone know of a way to do this other than ASP?

Thanks in advance for any help with this!

[Thing]

Look into the FileSystemObject using ASP:

http://www.w3schools.com/asp/asp_ref_filesystem.asp

As far as searching across a network thats really not going to be easy to do for security reasons. You would have to give all of your drives rights for the IUSER account to search/open files which would leave you completely vulnerable to attacks.

I would suggest a different route, but don't know of any to tell you.

[wdmny]

I don't think the FileSystemObject would really work since you would need to be able to handle the Word format. Additionally, it would take a lot of work to build a searching engine that could handle relevancy and ranked listings. A far simpler way to go is to use Index Server. Index Server will scan many types of documents and return your results in a ranked order.

You can read more specifics about searching with Index Server from this article I wrote a while back:
Searching with Index Server