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R E V I E W

Panning for Gold

September 18, 2003
By Sean Doherty

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dtSearch Web 6.20

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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

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.

Once we had a working index of Network Computing content, we launched the Web installer from within the desktop version. dtSearch Web installs with a wizard that identifies the default Web site and a common directory to run script files. During installation, the wizard provides options to customize the user interface. You can select default search strategies from an extensive list of options including Boolean, proximity, and fuzzy searching that lets you find misspelled words in documents.

Turning to the report logs, dtSearch only keeps a log of exceptions. It does not keep a detailed crawler log like Panoptic does. When we viewed the exception log, there were only seven errors in the indexing process (HTTP 404 errors), and none of the errors related to any of the pages used in our navigational testing.

dtSearch comes cheap, has a snappy indexer, integrates easily with IIS and includes a usable search form out of the box. However, it lacks the features and control of its rivals in spidering and indexing content.

dtSearch Web. dtSearch Corp., (800) IT-FINDS. www.dtsearch.com

Sean Doherty is a technology editor and lawyer based at our Syracuse University Real-World Labs®. A former project manager and IT engineer at Syracuse University, he helped develop centrally supported applications and storage systems. Write to him at sdoherty@nwc.com.

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