By Avi Rappoport Guest Writer, May 16, 2002
* New Search Engines in our Listings
(in alphabetical order)
AltaVista Desktop (Windows)
AltaVista is now shipping a desktop version of its corporate search engine, which indexes over 200 file formats and email. This allows employees to locate local content much as they find web pages or Intranet documents. Features include control over which files to index, scheduling and formatting of results. Desktop search competitors include dtSearch and Enfish.
http://www.searchtools.com/tools/altavista.html#desktop
http://solutions.altavista.com/en/products/avdesktop.shtml
Copernic Empower Indexer
Copernic, a long-time expert in metasearch, has announced the Copernic Indexer corporate search engine. It can index local servers, web and intranet sites and Exchange servers. Advanced search options include zones and file information, scalable to multiple servers.
http://www.searchtools.com/tools/copernic.html
http://www.copernic.com/enterprise/products/empower/features/indexing.html
KSearch Perl Search Engine
KSearch indexes local files and directories, provides both simple and advanced search with highlighting of matched terms. Perl has been tested on Unix and Windows, can handle sites with thousands of pages.
http://www.searchtools.com/tools/ksearch.html
http://www.kscripts.com/scripts.shtml
Google Search Appliance
Google has shipped a search engine hardware-software combination product, providing search functionality within corporate networks and firewalls. This complements their ASP Search Service, which is available to any site with Internet access. The Search Appliance provides many of the features of their web site, including the robot spider, PageRank indexing and searching, caching, spellchecker, language identification, and hit highlights within search results snippets. The search engine browser admin has many options for specifying sites and subdirectories to crawl, extensive indexing reports, passwords, server-side XSLT formatting of search results and search log reporting. Pricing is $20,000 for a small system (up to 150,000 pages) and $250,000 for a very large system with additional load balancing features that can index millions of pages. This is a good solid offering that gives other high-end search engines a run for the money, especially at larger scales.
For a longer review, please see
http://searchtools.com/analysis/google-appliance-v1.html
http://www.searchtools.com/tools/google-app.html
http://www.searchtools.com/tools/google-service.html
http://www.google.com/appliance/
Lycos InSite Pro: New search service report
Remote search hosting from Lycos uses the FAST Search engine, checks for updates every two days. Provides simple customization, reports on indexing and search, automatic inclusion in Lycos public search engine.
http://www.searchtools.com/tools/lycos-service.html
http://www.searchtools.com/tools/fastsearch.html
http://searchservices.lycos.com/searchservices/pro_overview.asp
S.L.I. Search
The developers of GlobalBrain search technology have acquired it back from NBCi and are now supporting it directly, as both software and search services. Features include learning from user behavior, vocabulary suggestions, metasearch combining results and customizability via XML search results.
http://www.searchtools.com/tools/sli.html
http://www.sli-systems.com/
WizDoc
Concept-oriented search engine for wider recall, also has a simple Boolean query option. It can segment documents by topic and show the relevant portions in search results.
http://www.searchtools.com/tools/wizdoc.html
http://www.wizsoft.com/wizdoc_main.html
Updates to Search Engines
(in alphabetical order)
AltaVista Enterprise Search 2.0: Search Engine Update
New version includes document-level security checking so the search results only show authorized documents, and an open architecture with modular access to the processes and XML interfaces. AutoCategorizer module combines rules and linguistic analysis for classification of documents into enterprise taxonomies.
http://www.searchtools.com/tools/altavista.html
http://solutions.altavista.com/en/products/aventerprise.shtml
FusionBot Search Service
New features include interface adjustments, date sorting and manual adjustments of relevance ranking for specific searches.
http://www.searchtools.com/tools/fusionbot.html
http://www.fusionbot.com/default.htm
HomepageSearchEngine
Frequent updates add Japanese and Romanian language support, indexing control, displaying web sites as results categories, and Mac OS X compatibility.
http://www.searchtools.com/tools/homepagesearchengine.html
http://www.homepagesearchengine.com/index.phtml
Inktomi Search version 4.3 and 4.4
4.3 Update provides "Quick Links" (recommended results for popular searches), integration with content management systems and improved database indexing interfaces. 4.4 has new language recognition capabilities, stemming deactivation and improvements in XML indexing administration.
http://www.searchtools.com/tools/inktomi-search.html#43
http://www.inktomi.com/products/search/
MondoSearch Version 4.4
MondoSearch, a Windows search engine and remote search service has shipped version 4.4, including Unicode text storage, many more languages, User Authentication with Microsoft Content Manager, additional relevance rank tools, and graphic results options.
http://www.searchtools.com/tools/mondosearch.html
http://www.mondosearch.com/
PicoSearch Service
New features include stemming, relevance rank controls, date display options, with time zone calculations and date sorting, dynamic search reports.
http://www.searchtools.com/tools/tools/picosearch.html
http://www.picosearch.com
Northern Light Acquired by divine
The Northern Light search engine company was acquired by divine, which will integrate the software and services with its content management system. Northern Light recently closed its public web portal and partnered with Yahoo to provide premium research information. Divine plans to target the technology mainly at the enterprise market.
http://www.searchtools.com/tools/northernlight.html
http://www.northernlight.com/enterprise/products.html
RetrievalWare Version 7
New version of this enterprise search engine includes video search integration, while image and audio search are available through consulting. Cross-lingual searches based on an internal semantic network for English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Dutch allow queries in one language and results in another. Categorization tools with multiple level taxonomies, can use explicit queries, fuzzy logic (good for ignoring OCR errors) and overriding Boolean control: the same functionality is implemented for alerting and filtering. This version adds security and authentication interfaces for third-party proxies and multiple depositories, and APIs for COM, ASP, and XML queries.
http://www.searchtools.com/tools/retrievalware.html
http://www.convera.com/Products/products_rw.asp
Webinator Version 4
New version of this powerful search engine brings a browser admin console, no longer limited to command lines and config files. Now supports cookies, meta robots tags, iframe tags, searching by date and within categories. A unique feature "Remove common" tells it not to index text that's the same on two or more documents, so that the index does not store navigation text before or after the content text. As of March 2002, this product supports Linux 2.4 and Mac OS X.
http://www.searchtools.com/tools/webinator.html
http://www.thunderstone.com/texis/site/pages/webinator.html
Avi Rappoport, Principal Consultant for Search Tools Consulting, is the leading authority on site, Intranet and topical portal search engines.
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