As of January, 2012, this site is no longer being updated, due to work and health issues
This survey has been on the SearchTools site since December 1998 and was distributed to the SearchTools News mailing list: the following report summarizes the 86 completed entries tabulated as of March 15, 1999. It is a self-selected group of respondents, and probably not statistically significant, but the results are interesting.
For general results, see the Survey Results page.
In the survey, we included a section about the site search tools that web administrators are using. The questions asked about the name of the product and allowed them to rate their tool, using this measure:
Form Rating Number
You can see the rating numbers in the listing below, and the products are sorted by the ratings (roughly).
We also asked "What works well about this site search tool?" and "Any problems or issues with this site search tool?": you can see the responses in this table.
| Search Tool |
rating
|
good features | problems |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ultraseek |
5
|
Low/no administration costs, incredibly customizable | Doesn't do Windows NT Challenge/Response and so it indexes the header of the rejection |
|
2
|
performance, administration, customization |
limited capabilities. Need synonym searching. |
|
| ht://Dig |
5
|
- | - |
|
4
|
- | - | |
|
2
|
It's better than nothing and inexpensive [free] | It's not thorough enough | |
| Phantom |
4
|
Easy to customize Multiple logical indexes |
no problems yet |
|
3
|
Robot | Crawling is slow. Data file is fragile- not robust | |
| Thunderstone (Webinator) |
4
|
switched from Excite | - |
|
-
|
good index, powerful |
- | |
| WebSTAR Search |
4
|
Natural language query results are very accurate (usually the answer I am looking for is in the top 3 results) | People don't understand how to do natural language queries, bad PDFs can corrupt the entire index. |
| Inquery 5.0 |
4
|
- | - |
| FrontPage Server Extensions |
1
|
fast, simple | not powerful enough (file formats, possibilities in general, e.g. to define queries at a given time oder e-mail results of queries on a regular basis like in Hyper-G/Hyperwave) |
|
3
|
- | searches only the entire intranet. Need one that searches only certain folders or files. | |
| Netscape Compass |
3
|
very fast and customizable | bad reindex algorithm, bad documentation |
|
2
|
Personalized newsletters. for users. |
Erratic with known categorization bugs |
|
| Verity (various incarnations) |
4
|
It is the only multilingual tool [we found] | mostly with the vendor. They are not particularly helpful to our developers who are trying to build a DataBlade on top of our Informix server. |
|
3
|
- | - | |
|
2
|
- |
Cold Fusion version: No scheduling/No spidering |
|
|
2
|
- | - | |
|
2
|
- | - | |
| WAIS & wais-sf |
3
|
fast, easy to administer, controls of "look and feel" | limited search results display options (i.e. it returns a "headline" which cannot be fielded or otherwise specified, except in terms of no. of characters.; no option to search within a search, or save searches. |
|
2
|
- | slow | |
|
2
|
- |
we don't have the budget to customize it properly (i.e., utilize our documents' inherent structure, properly leverage the documents' keywords which come from controlled vocabularies) | |
| SWISH & swish-e |
4
|
small index size, html tag aware, nice interface to front-ends, so we can do custom interfaces | not really. |
|
3
|
Swish is nice, free, does one server well. | Swish can only cover our one server, and I want to index about 20 throughout the School of Medicine. Harvest is no longer supported, and the AIX ver. I can install can't handle newer servers, frames, databases, etc. | |
|
1
|
It indexes |
doesn't handle phrases well, at all? |
|
| Index Server (MS) |
4
|
Easy to program | - |
|
-
|
automatic updates, support for multiple formats, integrated management of index, ability to customize the search and output | only works on local server (no spiders/robots) | |
|
2
|
Free and easy | not extensive enough, does not include all formats, we are looking for a new solution. | |
|
1
|
pulls out any reference to query words in search. offers links to page as well as summary | doesn't have any summary info on search result page, slow, often pulls older articles over more recent, pulls out any reference to query words in search. In members only section, search function adds abstracts, but includes the hidden java script instead of the document abstract. | |
|
1
|
- |
any classification about pages |
|
| Excite for Webservers |
2
|
It's free, provided we use company specific meta tags, the search results is pretty good. |
It's free w/ little to no support, have to reindex each server. |
|
n/a
|
config, run, search | not very powerful, not configurable | |
| Lycos Site Spider |
2
|
Easy to configure, returns results quickly | Will not do "Fuzzy" or "Like" searches. Seems to be case sensitive. |
| Intermediate Search |
2
|
Records details of searches in a file. | Has peculiar case sensitivity - doesn't always find pages containing words in a different case. Only searches the site it is running on, would like it to also search other web sites that I specify. |
| glimpseHTTP |
2
|
It's currently running | Relevance ranking, boolean searches, approximate searches, etc. all missing |
| HotBot (search limited to local site) |
1
|
- | It fails to locate prominent information. |
| PLWeb |
1
|
template configuration | big problems creating a large index, data can only be added incrementally |