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R E V I E W

Panning for Gold

September 18, 2003
By Sean Doherty

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Mondosoft MondoSearch 5.1

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	In this article
	Introduction
	CSIRO Panoptic Enterprise Search Engine 4.2.0
	Kanisa Site Search 5.0
	Mondosoft MondoSearch 5.1
	dtSearch Web 6.20
	Executive Summary \| Web Links
	How We Tested
	Report Card

Mondosoft's MondoSearch markets itself as a Web-site search engine created for the ordinary Web user. It aims to be user-friendly and capable of generating clear, useful results. Although we found this to be true, it did not perform as well as Panoptic or Kanisa in our navigational tests and came in second to Panoptic in indexing Network Computing's production Web site by making available 20,407 documents in just over five hours. MondoSearch took less time than Panoptic and Kanisa, but did not match the speedy indexing done by dtSearch.

MondoSearch was the only search engine we tested that could categorize Web site content automatically. Categories can provide context to searching and viewing results according to a document's subject matter, content type or other criteria. When you first use the crawler to grab content from a site, default categorization is applied and all pages are put in an "other" category. Once the initial site is grabbed and saved to the database, you can create categories unique to your site automatically or manually.

To generate automatic categories, you can make use of any metatags that your site uses to classify documents. InSite provides administration pages to virtually map a metatag to "content." For our production site, the "article type" metatag distinguishes content by type: review, feature, column, sneak preview, and so on. Once we mapped the "article type" tag to "content," we took the initial database of 20,184 documents and applied the new category rules using the crawler. MondoSearch automatically generated categories that could be applied to searches and added those categories to the user interface.

Categories can be created manually using a Web form in the InSite administration tool. Once you create them, you can access a site map (grab map) of content that was grabbed to apply your newly created categories to directories. The grab map feature is unique to MondoSearch. It lets you graphically view the directory schema of downloaded content and drill down to the actual document retrieved and indexed. You can also view content that was grabbed but not indexed because of an error, a duplicate, or exclusion by design or by the robots.txt file.

MondoSearch's installation on Windows 2000 is not as complex as Kanisa's but is more involved than those of Panoptic and dtSearch. You need to configure IIS to enable the search engine. Virtual directories are required for the Web server to execute files and scripts from a CGI-BIN directory.

After the installation, you can administer and manage the search engine from a Web browser, just like Kanisa and Panoptic. MondoSearch supports both Internet Explorer 5.0 and above and Netscape 4 and above. The first time you access the Web-browser administration pages (InSite), a wizard helps you create an initial user, define a target host to grab and set a default language.

You can start the crawler right from InSite. Although the default settings for the crawler may be sufficient, you want to make sure the Master database size is set to zero. That way, MondoSearch will control the size of the database as your Web site grows and updates are applied.

The user interface is implemented from design settings configured in InSite. InSite is also able to set a default search method to apply Boolean logic to multiple keywords entered on the search form. You can select a default and (search for all terms) or or (search for any terms). In addition, you can apply categories to searches and enable multiple category selections per search.

Unlike that of Kanisa and Panoptic, MondoSearch's InSite does not provide a method to automate the grabber and initiate or update the indexing process. You need to separately schedule the activity using Windows Task Manager. Although you can run the crawler with options, they require command-line parameters interpreted by their placement in the command line. It's clumsy, but you should only need to set it once.

InSite's log reporting capabilities lag behind Kanisa's, and its log files are not as extensive as Panoptic's. However, as with Kanisa, you can obtain extensive analytical reports of search-engine usage with the Behavior Tracking module. MondoSearch provides excellent control and management of the search process. It also provides an easy-to-configure sample search form with category search and retrieval at a moderate price.

MondoSearch 5.1. Mondosoft, (650) 462-2140, (800) 625-1175. www.mondosoft.com