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Search Engines

Last Updated: September 15, 2003

By Sean Doherty

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	In this project
	Introduction
	Kanisa's Site Search: A Guided Search with NLP

Join Sean Doherty as he examines Standalone, Search Engine Products for Enterprise for our upcoming September 18, 2003 issue.

New to this project is an interview with Sean, in which the author reveals conclusions drawn from the testing as well as expectations for future products.

While you're at it, see our editor's pick in action with a live installation of the Panoptic server. Bring your query and see how the engine parses real Network Computing content.

We also invite you to share your experiences, concerns and advice via our Shop Talk Forum.

Evaluation Particulars

What do we consider appropriate for this review?

We will consider products offering standalone, search engine products for enterprises.

We will be judging products based on the following criteria:

Indexing (Control, tagging, updating, etc.)
Searching (Control, logs, reporting, etc.)
Management (Installation, configuration, customization)
Integration (with portals, content/document management systems, etc.)
Price

This test will pit each product head-to-head in searching remote HTTP, HTTPS, and file server resources in an enterprise setting.

Requirements for Enterprise Search Engine Products

Product MUST NOT require the installation of a portal or other content/document management system
Product MUST NOT be a service
Standalone, search engine software with indexing engine
Appliance solution is acceptable
Search and indexing engine MUST run on its own server
Product MUST be capable of searching structured and unstructured data on remote servers (HTTP, HTTPS, and file servers)
Product MUST support ODBC (Open Database Connectivity) or JDBC (Java Database Connectivity) connectors or gateways to remote databases
Product MUST be capable of indexing and searching HTML, XML, MS-Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) and PDF documents
Product MUST include the following search features:
- Pre-built search forms
- Phrase searching
- Automatic stemming
- Spellchecking
- Optional output to XML
Product MUST include the following indexing features:
- Index secure Web pages
- Duplicate page detection