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	Issue TOC Print full article Print this page Download as PDF E-Mail this URL Discuss this article Flame the author     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

dtSearch's Web 6.20 is an easy-to-use search engine for Microsoft Internet Information Server 4 or later. It includes the dtSearch desktop version and an indexer application that satisfied our minimum requirements. Although dtSearch does not come with as many bells and whistles as Kanisa or MondoSearch, it was the easiest to set up and install on a Windows 2000 Server.

Installable via CD-ROM, the dtSearch desktop version is used to create and manage indexes for file systems or Web sites. It also launches the Web installer and creates a Web search form. We decided to index our production Web site before launching the installer. When you set up the Web version, it makes previously generated indexes accessible in the Web search form. If you add or remove indexes from service after installing the Web version, you need to regenerate the search form created during the installation for the changes to take effect. This is not true if you simply update an index manually or if you automate the update using Windows Task Manager.

As with our other participants, creating a collection or index involves configuring a spider to crawl a Web site. With dtSearch's spider, we had the fewest options but the fastest performance. It made more than 20,000 documents available within an hour. Unfortunately, in this case, haste made waste. It was our worst performer in the navigational search tests when using an automatic Boolean search for the keywords entered in a search form.