Zebra

Platform: Unix, Windows (Win32)
Price: free, open source, GNU GPL (commercial support available)

Indexes both free text and fielded information.
Indexes local files, no robot for remote spidering.
Input filters for recognizing structured text in SGML, XML, MARC and other ASCII text formats.
Free text and Boolean queries, regular expressions and right truncation.
Approximate matching (for spelling mistakes).
Responds to Z39.50 distributed search clients.

Comparing Open Source Indexers Infomotions Musings; May 29, 2001 by Eric Lease Morgan (updated November 19, 2004)
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.

How Zebra Earned Its Stripes Open Magazine: September 26, 2003, by Nancy Cohen
Article explains the history and mission of Zebra, which provides its free open-source software to libraries. Focuses on Zebra's open-source business model, with sidebar information on the Z39.50 protocol.

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