Swish-e, a free open-source Unix search engine, Swish-e is fast at indexing and searching, and quite flexible. It can handle simple authentication, indexes HTML, text, XML, and (via converters), PDF, MS Word, Excel and MP3 ID3 tags, with an emphasis on storing feilds/tags for specifying during search. Resuts can be sorted by relevance, date, size, and other fields. It runs as a CGI to a web server (Apache recommended), and has a fairly active user and developer base. New features include adjustments to the relevance algorithm, “near” operator and “?” single character wildcard operator (in addition to “*”).

Xapian Code Library Searchtools Report Updated
Xapian is an active open source high-performance text retrieval system, based on years of research and scalable to very large sets of documents. It now includes the Omega search engine, an application that implements the code library and makes it relatively simple to install and run.

Auction Inspector - eBay Hunting tool!
New Product! Signup for Affiliate Resources: www.auctioninspector.com/affiliates. Auction Inspector - eBay Hunting tool! - The Bissell Little Green Deep Cleaner is portable for small jobs but powerful enough for big jobs. Bissell’s ProHeat system keeps water hot for optimal cleaning while TurboBrush technology powers rotating brushes to get deep-down dirt. The […]

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.

empty queries - what’s going on?
Does anyone have any good feeling as to why there are so many empty searches? As far as I can tell, most of them are searches where the user somehow clicked the search button or put the cursor into the query field and pressed the Return key.I first noticed empty searches back in the day, when I was working with a party planning site. I insisted on getting search logs and there were all those empty queries. In that case, it was particularly important, because the database back end took an empty query to be a request for every item in the catalog, displayed by order entered. When I reported it to my client, they fixed that and suddenly the load on the database went way down (a win for log analysis!)I’m still baffled. I’m looking at a big busy site log right now, and checking out some of the sessions which include empty queries. Most of the time, the user just goes away. Sometimes they do another empty query (or click the search button). If they type a search term, it’s almost never anything to do with the site contents — they probably think they’re on a webwide search engine.So what should a search engine do if there’s nothing in the search box?Show a simple query page (this is what most of them do).Do nothing. This seems pretty easy to implement, just a little javascript around the search form. But will it confuse people? Frustrate them? Make them want to kick the computer?Show a little dialog that says they have to enter something in the search field. I know an intranet that does this, it seems to work very nicely, but that’s a controlled environment.Has anyone done any usability testing with this problem? Any insights? I’m boggled and would very much appreciate ideas here.

Solr Open Source Enterprise Search and Faceted Metadata Server - new Searchtools Report
The Solr Java open-source search engine builds on the Lucene engine, adding more standard tools for indexing, query processing and sending back results. While Solr does not have a site indexing crawler, it can use Nutch or any other robot crawler, and accept content converted from any native format to a simple XML schema. The architecture provides powerful tools for analyzing and transforming text to create a very rich index with structured fields. It accepts a wide variety of query operators, and parameters to control retrieval and ranking, including sorting on specified fields. The default relevance ranking can be tuned to suit the needs of the users and content, and the search results provide the valuable match terms in context for each item. In addition to lists of results, Solr has faceted metadata displays dynamically calculated for search results, allowing users to drill down on topics, date ranges, price, brand or any other attribute. For scaling to millions of documents and high search traffic, the system offers caching configuration, index replication, autowarming for new starts. It’s installed on such high-traffic sites as CNET, shopper.com, and The Internet Archive, showing its scalability, and has active developer and user mailing lists.

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