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Open-Source Search Engines October 16, 2000 |
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Open-source search-engine efforts are alive and well. They may not be quite up to the highest capacity, but they are almost infinitely configurable. Most are light on user interface for the search administrator and require command-line and config-file control, but they are powerful and flexible. Ht://Dig (www.htdig.org) was developed at San Diego State University and released under the GPL (GNU General Public License). It's a solid search engine for Unix machines. Ht://Dig's robot crawls links on Web pages and the indexer interfaces with open-source code to read PDF and Microsoft Word files. The response is fast and the relevance ranking reasonable (it will improve in version 3.2, under development as of this writing). There are several options for "fuzzy" text searching, including soundalikes, common word endings and synonyms. The system has required configuration files for administration, but an open-source ConfigDig interface now provides access via Web browsers to many of the features. The core development team is active and responsible, and there's a friendly community mailing list. UdmSearch (search.mnogo.ru) was also developed under the GPL and can index Web pages, FTP sites, Usenet newsgroups and local files. For index storage, it can use almost any SQL server. Because it was developed in the Russian Federation of Udmurtia, it's very good at supporting multiple character sets and languages. In addition to simple HTML forms, UdmSearch provides PHP3, PERL and C CGI access to the search engine, offering significant flexibility and options in arranging search results. There's an active online community, and the developers answer questions quickly.
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