Specs for search engines?

[Petter Naess]

Reply to the message of Thursday August 22, 1996 07:00 +0200
-----------------------------------------------------------------
>At 05:42 08/21/96 -0700, KAREN SCHNEIDER wrote:
>>If you were going to purchase a search engine for your
>>rapidly-growing library website, with an eye to delivering a large
>>number of electronic documents and other resources to a
>>heterogenous community, what would you look for?

>>Or, put another way--am I on the right track here?

>>*  It should support structured and unstructured searches

>Absolutely.  This is the show stopper for many systems and the
>fundamental issue we have tried to address with our KE Texpress
>product.  Generally speaking, systems that handle structured data well
>can't do indexed key word retrieval across large passages of
>unstructured text i.e. documents. Some add on text products text
>products are appearing for relational products, but as separate
>engines they don't integrate the free text well with the structured
>data types. Structured systems quite often require you to do slow
>wildcard searches to find keywords within fields less than 256
>characters, unless you provide all of the leading words.

>Conversely, you don't use free text products to manage your catalogue.

>>*  It should have highly configurable output

>Yes.  It would also be advantageous if it would support insert, update
>and delete functions through Web forms, rather than query only, for
>all those Intranet sites you will build when you jump on that
>bandwagon.

>>*  It should kick butt.  ;-)

>As always.

>How about if it also provided enhanced auditing over and above
>standard Web logs e.g. number of records retrieved, accurate
>description of query terms and more?


>>Karen G. Schneider/US EPA Region 2 Library
>>schneider.karen at epamail.epa.gov
>>opinions mine alone



>Andrzej Kowalski
>################
>Andrzej Kowalski
>KE Software Inc.
>andrzej at kesoftware.com
>http://www.kesoftware.com
>303-601 West Broadway
>Vancouver, BC, Canada, V5Z 4C2
>Tel: (604) 877-1960
>Fax: (604) 877-1961
>###############

Haven't looked into this myself, but I believe askSam Professional 3.0
for Windows might also do these things (ie.both structured and
unstructured tasks) for you. There's a review of it in the July/August
1996 issue of Knight Ridder's Information World Review. We've used the
DOS version of askSam for a number of years for a small documents
database, after starting out with Dbase and the frustrating limitations
Andrzej attributes to structured systems, and were very pleased with it.
Regards, Petter Naess