The Fluid Dynamics Search Engine is a Perl CGI script that performs nicely on sites below 10,000 pages. It can crawl links or read a local file system to gather text, HTML and PDF files, and includes extensive controls for excluding pages. Search supports Internet query operators, Boolean operators and quotes. There’s an option to allow public submission of URLs for topical portal search, and the admin is all done via browser interface. Only $40, runs on Unix, Windows, Mac OS X, and the documentation is excellent.

IBM OmniFind Yahoo Edition - new Searchtools Report
OmniFind Yahoo! Edition is a free search engine based on the open-source Lucene core, is a reasonably full-featured search that can index up to 500,000 pages, making it an interesting competitor to the Google Search Appliance, Autonomy Ultraseek and Solr, as well as lower-end search engines. Features include an automated install package for Windows and Linux, browser administration, a powerful web crawling robot, file system remote crawler, index support for over 400 file types (using the Inside Out system for file reading), query parsing recognizes Internet Query Operators and Boolean operators, provides a spellchecker, synonym and suggestions, and Lucene-based stemming. It indexes and searches Arabic, Czech, Danish, German, Greek, English, Spanish, Finnish, French, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese. Searches can be sent via REST, and the results formatted within the admin interface, or sent back as ATOM, HTML with XSLT or XML, and linked to optional local document caching. Enterprise support is available from IBM. There are some first-release glitches, but it’s a well-designed package that’s easy to use interactively, with some powerful automation interfaces ready for those who need more flexibility. Definitely worth a look.

Analysis & Review of the Webinator Search Engine
In this review, I cover every aspect of the Thunderstone Webinator search engine, looking at what’s possible, what’s special and what’s missing. I’ve been much helped by the posts on the Webinator support mailing list and the frank answers from Thunderstone’s representative, as well as several working indexes on one of their test appliances. See my full review for details of indexing, access control, query processing, retrieval, relevance ranking, results page layout and search reports, and my conclusions.

New Google hosted search with no advertising
Called the Google Custom Search Business Edition, this is a hosted site search, designed for small businesses with web site content, who don’t want the advertising displayed on the older Custom Search Engine. This version uses Google’s existing index of the Internet, searching all the pages they know about it on the specified sites including non-HTML file types, using their query language, retrieval and relevance algorithsm, and searching in multiple languages and character sets. Like the web search engine, there is no way to index pages protected by access control such as passwords or ACLs. The default interface customization is limited to a logo and colors of the results page border, title, background, text and links, but the XML results format is fairly configurable using the Google AJAX Search API. While there is no structure in place to display site advertising on search results, presumably one could do that very easily with XML results. Reports are limited to top queries and queries per day/week/month/all, but can be connected to the Google Activity Monitor site traffic analysis tool. Note that Google will not guarantee that they’ll crawl all of the pages of a particular site, update on-demand, or even update frequently. Using this service will not improve a site’s position in the Google.com search results. Pricing is $100 per year for up to 5,000 pages; $500 per year for up to 50,000 pages (both payable by credit card via Google Checkout). According to ecommerce-guide.com, it seems to go to a $15,000 per year fee for up to 1 million pages, but potential customers should contact the company. (Non-profits, university and government agencies can use the standard Custom Search and opt-out of advertising).

i411 - Searchtools Report Updated
i411 is a faceted metadata search and browse engine, capable of scaling to very large deployments, such as the DexOnline yellow pages site, which uses it for both search results and browse navigation. The most recent version adds a web crawler to the local file and database connectors, a natural language module that can extract entities from queries and provide concept-based spellcheck, more flexibility in the search flow, and a SiteOptimizer analytics and reporting module to expose site dynamics and user behavior.(Disclaimer: I consulted with DexOnline and helped them choose the engine among a very strong field of candidates.)

Google CSE - different results when searching more than three sites
A support document for the Google CSE (Custom Search Engine)and CSBE (Custom Search Business Edition) notes that some results may be different than those found in the same search on Google.com. It attributes this to including more than three sites in the CSE, and says that the CSE is using a subset of the Google.com index. They recommend limiting the CSE to three sites, changing the behavior to ‘Search the entire web but emphasize included sites’, or adding refinements that have the same effect.As of August 16, 2007, the support note says “We’re working to bring more complete results to all Custom Search Engines.”.

Recreational Vehicles & Trailers
Recreational RV’s and Trailer Camping and Traveling with Rangerrob.

Rangerrob’s Midi Music Download Site
MIDI Music download site from Rangerrob and friends.

Fly Fishing with Rangerrob & Friends
Welcome to the Flyfishing Pacific Northwest, Canada fishing. Rangerrob and readers fishing the Northwest Region

Info Today Report: “Enterprise Search: Deployment, Usage and Trends”
A survey of 250 professionals connected to search in their enterprise has some enlightening results. They were a fairly wide variety of industries, organization sizes, departments and roles (described in detail in the report), so the results are generally applicable. This survey contradicts conventional wisdom by reporting that 62% of these enterprises have more than one search engine, with a 27% of having four or more search engines. In my view, this indicates the understanding that one search cannot solve all problems, and that some areas will require specialized, and usually more powerful, search solutions.The other response which surprised me was that 20% of respondents said they already provide search for audio and video, and 35% said they want to do so in the future. I suppose some of that is podcasts and training videos, and it’s a big challenge for search, although much easier if there are transcripts or textual captions.The report also covers integration with other applications (mainly CMS and KM), current search solutions, vendor support satisfaction, software vs. hosted search vs. appliance (only 17% reported using a search appliance), upgrade plans, and search features currently available and desired for the future. There’s a long section about the respondents’ relative emphasis on various criteria for selecting a search solution, covering ease of use, features, integration, cost, scalability, speed, vendor reputation, ease of installation, upgradability, and vendor support.This report is available on the Enterprise Search Center, at a cost of $495 US. The study was conducted by Shore Communications and Faulkner Information Services.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 20th, 2007 at 3:25 pm and is filed under Tooling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.