Search Tools Product Reports
MPS Information Server
Product Information
Warning: this product has no indication of continuing development
Platform: Unix (AIX, DEC, HP-UX, Linux, Solaris, SunOS) and Windows NT
Price: depends on configuration
Features
- Highly optimized search engine
- Parallel searching
- Indexes local files, databases, web sites (using Black Widow Web Crawler
module)
- Can index by field, recognize dates and perform range searching
- Scalable
- Customizable, including a parser toolkit
- Supports Z39.50
- Source Code available
- Version 6 released September 2000
Articles & Reviews
- Comparing
Open Source Indexers Infomotions Musings; May 29, 2001 by Eric Lease
Morgan
Describes the history and features of eight open-source search engines, freeWAIS-sf
(aging code and hard to install, but good for searching email and public domain
etexts); Harvest (powerful gathering features for
frequently-changing data stores, good with structured documents); ht://Dig
(tricky to configure, no phrase searching, automatic stemming and match word
highlighting); Isearch (weak documentation and
support, easy to install, dated interface, Z39.50 support); MPS Information
Server (zippy indexing of both text and structured data, Z39.50 support,
Perl API, limited documentation); SWISH-E (simple
to install engine, CGIs in Perl and PHP still beta, good for HTML pages, recognizes
new META tags, sorts results by field; WebGlimpse
(easy to install and configure, requires commercial version for customized
output); Yaz/Zebra (mainly Z39.50, no Perl API, mainly
a toolkit to index and respond to distributed client queries). Article also
points out that chaotic information is less than helpful and encourages organization,
structure and vocabulary control.
- TREC articles
FS Consulting, developers of MPS, took part in the TExt
Retrieval Conference organized by the US National Institute of Standards
and Technology to encourage research in information retrieval from large text
collections. The conference set various tasks for search engines and provided
a venue for the developers to test them. The following links are to articles
written about using the search engine for the TREC tasks.
-
Examples