A Linux Story
I installed a shell script on the server from the command line without problems. Velocity's Web administration can be summed up in three Cs: clean, compact and configurable. Velocity defines global options that control clustering, metasearch and general setup for search sources and collections, as well as global variables used for XSL transformations. The default settings were sufficient to get me started, but if you plan to use Vivisimo's API integration you may have to modify the "query-meta" project.
Vivisimo lets you choose external search sources for your network to use, including general search engines such as GigaBlast and Google and specific Web sites like www.nwc.com. In accordance with your configuration, Velocity parses the resulting XML feed or HTML output with XSL to provide clustered search results.
I tested this by creating a source of GigaBlast. Although the process was intimidating, I got started without diving too deep into the documentation. From the admin page, I entered a source URL (
http://www.gigablast.com/search?raw=8), a get method to obtain input, and several parameters to identify the query string and set the number of results per page. The template included advanced options, declarations, testing and XML. An advanced section in the source configuration delved into matching the logical operators like and to plus (+), not to minus (-), phrase to quotes (" ") and so on.
Next, I made a search collection of all the content on the Network Computing Web site by adding a seed URL (http://www.nwc.com) and restricting the page output to the nwc domain. On a business day, Velocity's crawler snatched more than 23,000 URLs and indexed them in approximately 547 MB of disk space.
