FACILITATING SEARCHES THROUGH CONTENT WHICH IS ACCESSIBLE THROUGH WEB-BASED FORMS

One embodiment of the present invention provides a system that facilitates crawling through web-based forms to gather information to facilitate subsequent searches through content which is accessible though the web-based forms. During operation, the system first obtains web-based forms to be searched. Note that the system can obtain these web-based forms from a number of sources. For example, the system can crawl through web sites to identify web-based forms, the system can receive manually provided web-based forms, or the system can find web-based forms through methods other than crawling. Next, the system creates database entries for the identified forms. This involves obtaining and storing metadata describing the identified forms into database entries and then storing these database entries in a form database to facilitate searches through content which is accessible through the identified forms. Note that this form database can include a web index and associated documents, which can be used to facilitate web search queries that return both ordinary documents and documents that result from form queries.