I've been experimenting with Links 2.0 and DbMan to find
out exactly what I can and can't do with them. Have used
many of the popular modifications, and incorporated a few
minor mods of my own.

The next thing I need to do implies a major revision of
search.cgi -- it's related to a question I asked in
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/...st&Number=140251

Before I start, I would like to be sure that I am not
re-inventing a wheel ... so does anyone know of an existing
mod that will allow me to use Links 2.0 to create searchable
categories in static pages with NO LINKS?

File categories.db would have many additional fields, but
there would be no links.db at all. The default search.cgi
gets results only from links.db, so it would have to be
modified to get results only from categories.db

Has this been done before?

I guess it would be easier to do it with Links SQL, but
the database I have in mind would be quite small --
projected maximum size about 500kb. I would like to see
what is possible in the flatfile method first.