Searches in which we typed a proper name or a phrase in quotation marks were successful, too. Case-sensitive searching (when we wanted to discover the company's employment poli cies regarding AIDS, for example) gave us the right answer without littering our browser window with false matches. Ultraseek Server uses stemming (for instance, the keyword travels searches for travel, traveled and traveler) to automatically broaden searches. It also let us limit searches to text within predefined HTML fields, such as the title of a document or within links. Ultraseek Server's proximity search feature successfully located project within 10 words of schedule when we used the "NEAR 10" keyword and argument.

We found features in Ultraseek Server for both neophyte and advanced users. Its intuitive interface let us search our intranet without first studying the product's user manual. We especially liked the way it refined our searches by using the initial results as the basis for further searching, instead of starting from scratch.

In our testing, Ultraseek Server's exact document count (the search engine's ability to return the exact number of documents containing each word and phrase in the query, as well as the number of documents that match the entire query) also helped us refine our queries.

Ultraseek Server uses InXight's LinguistX to process natural-language queries. This technology tags parts of speech within queries and identifies phrases the search engine uses to automatically increase the query's precision. When we wanted to override this feature, we used query operators (Boolean logic). Ultraseek Server detected the use of Boolean expressions, assumed we were query experts and disabled its linguistic processing.

Administration was easy. We pointed Ultraseek Server at our intranet's home page and found that we could immediately enter search queries. Like AltaVista Search Intranet eXtension 97, Ultraseek Server indexes (spiders) Web pages in real-time. As we modified the site's Web pages, Ultraseek Server detected the frequency of changes and thereafter checked the modified Web pages more often.

Digital Equipment Corp. AltaVista Search Intranet eXtension 97
Kudos to the Digital programmers for building an indexer that can handle a greater variety of document formats than the other products and for the thorough index its software creates. But thumbs down to them for the lack of a natural-language interface and stemming, both key features of Ultraseek Server. We also found the user interface harder to use than Ultraseek Server's. Although Digital's search engine found the information we searched for, it produced more false matches than Ultraseek Server. To its credit, however, the product's search engine gave us fewer false matches than IntelliServ did.

Digital's AltaVista search engine, best known for its indexing of Internet content, is available for corporate intranets in the AltaVista Search Intranet eXtension 97 product (which we affectionately dubbed SIX-97). It indexed our Web site in real-time, crawling through the Web pages with alacrity. The product e mbodies the same indexing technology as the AltaVista Internet site's global search engine.

From the start, the product impressed us with its ability to index a variety of document formats, from Adobe PostScript to Microsoft Word for Windows. Digital says its converter (which runs in the background, alongside the indexer) handles more than 200 formats, a claim we're inclined to believe because it handled the many formats in our lab so well. Furthermore, Digital offers the user interface in 23 languages and lets you select the language for your search. While indexing, SIX-97 uses a dictionary-based methodology to identify the dominant language of a page.