Like AltaVista's SIX-97, DB/Text Intranet Spider processed our intranet's Microsoft Word documents, Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets, WordPerfect documents, PDF files and other file formats. However, it doesn't handle as many types as SIX-97 does. As it roved our intranet, DB/Text Intranet Spider collected and cataloged content (as a bstracts or full text, your choice), HTTP properties and even Microsoft Office properties (when it encountered that type of file). It indexed HTML, plain text and various document types in real-time in the lab, and we liked the way we could configure the product to index during off-peak hours. Additionally, after the initial indexing effort, DB/Text Intranet Spider focused only on updated documents, intelligently avoiding reindexing unmodified documents.

We were intrigued by the approach Inmagic/Lycos have taken to the refinement of search operations. Inmagic's Java Word Wheel software, included with DB/Text Intranet Spider, gave us preview options that productively helped us narrow our searches. It told us the number of documents containing our search criteria and let us peek at the index to see which words and phrases we could use to concentrate our search efforts.

Looking into the index helped us find additional relevant Web pages our initial set of keywords missed. For Web pages containing mater ial written by people with wildly different styles (one person uses the word movie and another uses film, for example), the index preview feature is a lifesaver. For the search itself, the engine allowed basic keyword queries of the index.

ISYS/Odyssey Development ISYS:web 2.0
ISYS:web 2.0 is especially appropriate for novice users and small-to-medium-sized Web sites. It has a helpful search engine with a number of useful features, but ISYS:web lacks a natural-language interface, stemming and the ability to traverse a Web site via HTTP. It's more than a basic search engine but, because it produced more false matches, its not quite in the league of DB/Text Intranet Spider. Its helpful push button-oriented query interface and ability to display portions of sizable Web pages made it a better search engine than Index Server or Compass Server.

ISYS:web impressed us in the lab with its ability to index the contents of Microsoft Office97 files, WordPerfect files, Ad obe PDF files and even ODBC data sources. It performed fuzzy searching of our documents and Web pages, and ISYS:web let us search phonetically or with shortcuts (such as with starts withı). The query interface made using Boolean operators a bit easier by displaying push buttons with labels such as "AND which also containsı" and "in the same PARAGRAPH ası"

In our tests, ISYS:web gave us proximity searching, displayed only relevant sections of large documents and Web pages, and--unique among the products reviewed--used fuzzy search logic to find misspelled words. It also let us iteratively refine our searches with a series of foolproof menus.

ISYS:web didn't have a natural-language interface, and it requires file-oriented access to Web pages and other documents to be indexed.

Odyssey Development says ISYS: web can handle more than 40 document formats. It can run as a standalone Web server and, when used just as a search engine alongside another Web server, you must configure it to use a specific TC P/IP port number.