SearchTools.com - copyright © 1999-2011 by Search Tools Consulting.
This work is licensed for redistribution under a Creative Commons Attribution - Share Alike 3.0 License.
As of January, 2012, this site is no longer being updated, due to work and health issues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 September 9, 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.
This survey is copyright © 1999 by Search Tools Consulting, and all rights are reserved. The survey was designed, analyzed and reported by Avi Rappoport. Personal information in the survey will be kept private at all times. For reprint permissions or survey aggregate data purchase, please contact Search Tools Consulting.
Disclosure: The SearchTools.com site is provided as a free service to the web development community and is not sponsored by any advertisers. However, Search Tools Consulting has provided analysis and information to search engine devlopers including Atomz, AltaVista, Siderean, Google, Inktomi, Maxum (Phantom) and Mondosoft (MondoSearch). We do not give them site visitor or survey personal information or allow our relationships with any vendors to change any product review or analysis.
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 We also asked the people how long they have been using the engine -- those who are new to a product may not be the most reliable at evaluation. And we provided fields to describe what they liked and disliked about the product. Here are the responses, in alphabetical order by product:
| Search Tool |
rating
|
how |
What works well about this site search tool? | Any problems or issues with this site search tool? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Custom Engine | 2 | 4 years | - | speed (possibly due to hardware) |
| 2 | 3 years | - | - | |
| 2 | 2 years | - | - | |
| 2 | 6 months | Does a simple, keyword-based search. | Users need a full-text search | |
| 1 | 2 years | - | not specific in returning results; no ability to do advanced searching or modify searches or refine search within a returned set of search results | |
| Alkaline | 5 | 6 months | It does what I want and does not pretend to do more. It's easy to install and it's free. | |
| Excite for Webservers (EWS) | 3 | 2.5 years | Fast, supports multiple collections, ranking system is OK; version we're using is free | Can't search for fixed phrases in quotation marks; no Boolean capabilities. |
|
2
|
2+ years |
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. |
|
| 2 | 1 year | - |
Can't index PDF |
|
| 1 | 1 year | - | doesn't find many pages! | |
| 1 | 2 years | Easy to administer, stable | results are not useful and often don't retrieve what they should at all | |
|
-
|
2 years | config, run, search | not very powerful, not configurable | |
| FreeFind | 5 | 3 months | Most everything is good, actually. It's a very professional tool | Not enough control of how the results pages look. In particular I would like to add links for further search opinions (searching the web etc.) |
| FrontPage Server Extensions |
3
|
5 months | - | searches only the entire intranet. Need one that searches only certain folders or files. |
| 1 | 1 year | It finds stuff | Don't like the report generated--only brings user to page, not reference within page. | |
|
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) | ||
| Hummingbird Search Server (formerly Fulcrum) | 2 | 2 years | fast, has vendor API | hard to maintain, not many new features, vanilla keyword searching, low throughput/not scalable |
| glimpse & WebGlimpse | 3 | 5 years | ||
| 3 | 1 month | Well, it generally works rather well. | Problems with umlauted characters (WebGlimpse) | |
|
2
|
2 years | It's currently running | Relevance ranking, boolean searches, approximate searches, etc. all missing | |
| 2 | 3 years | Proximity searching (search strings), searching for regular expressions, boolean queries | Ranking of hits, searching in html tags | |
| 1 | 3 years | It's installed... | Terrible features | |
| Search Tool |
rating
|
how |
What works well about this site search tool? | Any problems or issues with this site search tool? |
| harvest | 2 | 4 years | - | will no longer cope with newer developments, specifically can't cope with http v1.1 on server so much of site no longer indexed |
| hotlinks | 4 | 1 month | - | - |
| ht://Dig |
5
|
1 year | - | - |
|
4
|
- | - | - | |
| 3 | 2 years | |||
|
2
|
2 months | It's better than nothing and inexpensive [free] | It's not thorough enough | |
| iCat internal search | 1 | 4 weeks | - | questionable |
| iFilter | 4 | 6 months | indexes CONTENT of PDF files | periodic incompatibilities between Adobe and Microsoft |
| Index Server (Microsoft) | 4 | 1 year | Very customizable - can search by boolean or natural language - multilingual - can search/sort by numerous types of data (author, title, date, etc.) - FREE | poor documentation included - must go to Microsoft site for in-depth info on use and customization. |
|
4
|
3 months | Easy to program | - | |
| 3 | 2 years | 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
|
2 years | Free and easy | not extensive enough, does not include all formats, we are looking for a new solution. | |
| 2 | 3 months | - | - | |
| 2 | 3 months | OK for searching product data | poorly configured, hard to optimize | |
|
1
|
6 months | 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
|
1 year |
managing frame |
any classification about pages |
|
|
1
|
6 months | It retrieves the correct documents | Very difficult to configure, documentation is very poor. | |
| Inquery 5.0 |
4
|
3 months | - | - |
| Intermediate Search |
2
|
few months | 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. |
| Search Tool |
rating
|
how |
What works well about this site search tool? | Any problems or issues with this site search tool? |
| Inmagic / DBTextworks Intranet Spider / Lycos Site Spider |
2
|
Easy to configure, returns results quickly | Will not do "Fuzzy" or "Like" searches. Seems to be case sensitive. | |
| 3 | 2 months | You can add fields and edit information in the database itself, eg. value added indexing terms and abstracts which aid retrieval. Total control over design of query screens and report formats. Every searching feature known to mankind (except proximity)- boolean within and across fields, field specific, range searching Will spider documents in a file directory too if asked to. | Not yet | |
| Mannion Tech's Sinky Search Engine | 1 | couple of months | - | I does not display any thing expcet the query in in the address bar |
|
NOTE: MondoSoft suggested that their customers should fill out the survey. |
5 | 3 years | handling of Frames, categorized results, easy setup and update, ISP hosting of search. | Does not read pdf files |
| 5 | 1 year + | Administration interface Support of meta-tags Presentation of results | - | |
| 5 | 3 months | Very nice grouping and display of search results, frame support, etc. | No problems. | |
| 5 | 4 months | - | - | |
| 4 | 3 years | - | - | |
| 4 | 1 year | Indexing | does not include sub-search | |
| 4 | 1 month | Works with frames | No problems | |
| 4 | 9 months | - | - | |
| 3 | 1+ years | Excellent search in dynamic pages | Does not - in the interface - satisfy the advanced user's preference for using operators (i.e. demonstrate personal skills...) | |
| Muscat | 3 | several years | ranks pages for relevance | ISP is about to withdraw this service |
| Search Tool |
rating
|
how |
What works well about this site search tool? | Any problems or issues with this site search tool? |
| Netscape Compass | 3 | 1 year | - | Indexing Problem, Inclusions & Exclusions from collection is a big problem. |
|
3
|
3 months | very fast and customizable | bad reindex algorithm, bad documentation | |
| 2 | 2 years | full text search | you manually have to create and [edit] the collections | |
|
2
|
8 months |
Personalized newsletters. for users. |
Erratic with known categorization bugs |
|
| 2 | 3 months | - | - | |
| 2 | 2 months | The search allows users to search multiple repositories of information with a single command or search entry. | Categorization is manual and labour-intensive. A simple search is not necessarily the answer to finding a specific technical answer within a large volume of information. That is, the tool consolidates a search, but most searches return too many results. | |
| OfficeVision/400 (not just for web servers) | 4 | 10 years | Combined search of content and object descriptions | IBM are withdrawing support |
| Phantom |
4
|
Easy to customize Multiple logical indexes |
no problems yet |
|
|
3
|
Robot | Crawling is slow. Data file is fragile- not robust | ||
| PicoSearch | 2 | 1 week | quick | never updated |
| - | 1 day | - | - | |
| PLWeb |
1
|
template configuration | big problems creating a large index, data can only be added incrementally | |
| search Light | 3 | 2 months | - | - |
| SiteServer (Microsoft) | 5 | 6 months | Speed, Indexable properties | - |
| SWISH & swish-e |
4
|
4 years | small index size, html tag aware, nice interface to front-ends, so we can do custom interfaces | not really. |
|
3
|
1-2 years |
It indexes |
doesn't handle phrases well, at all? |
|
| 3 | 2 years | does simple minded indexing well | hard to control how far it goes from a local page | |
| 2 | 3 years | fast | indices take a long time to build for large sites | |
|
1
|
3-4 years | 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. | |
| Ultraseek (various versions) |
5
|
3 months | (version 3.0) Low/no administration costs, incredibly customizable | Doesn't do Windows NT Challenge/Response and so it indexes the header of the rejection |
|
5 |
2 years | Intelligent spider, ability to split indexing and searching across multiple machines, very good technical support | - | |
|
2
|
6 months |
performance, administration, customization |
limited capabilities. Need synonym searching. |
|
| Search Tool |
rating
|
how |
What works well about this site search tool? | Any problems or issues with this site search tool? |
| Verity (various incarnations) |
4
|
3 years | 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. |
| 4 | 5 years | Very customizable, Topics are very powerful | Technical support needs improvement, need to concentrate on getting their core products working correctly. | |
| 4 | 1 year | highly configurable, feature set comprehensive and it seems all we need is already thought of. The support staff at Verity is phenomenally helpful. | The product needs configuring to be effective. To get performance right out-of-the-box requires prior experience with the product. | |
|
3
|
1 year | - | - | |
| 3 | 3 years | consistent | no problems | |
| 2 | 3 months | The hits come up as links. If language is carefully used, good hits result. | Hard to customize, and it needed lots of customization.When I had trouble with customization, there was no where to turn for help. No one knew how to do it or who to call that might. | |
|
2
|
- |
- |
Cold Fusion version: No scheduling/No spidering |
|
|
2
|
1 month | - | - | |
| 1 | 2 years | - | The site retrieves results with partial key word occurences. Key word occurence navigation is clumsy. Document comparison is clumsy. | |
|
1
|
1 year | - | - | |
| WAIS & wais-sf |
3
|
4 years | 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
|
4 years | - | slow | |
|
2
|
3 years |
- |
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) | |
| Webinator (Thunderstone) |
4
|
2 months | switched from Excite | - |
| 3 | 2 weeks | ability to create results pages identical to rest of site | [remote version] elimination of database if not used for 5 days; lack of radio button choice for "this site" and "the web" | |
|
2
|
- |
good index, powerful |
- | |
| 2 | 6 months | single-term searches work fine | Gives title and first ~60-80 words, need title and description | |
| 1 | 2 years | - | It's been hard to configure Webinator to produce relevant results for users. | |
| WebIndex (O'Reilly) | 1 | 3 years | can run on schedule, allows us to exclude files based on file names contains, file title contains | takes too long to create and merge indices, not always accurate |
| 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. | |
| Xavatoria + Fluid Search | 4 | few days | Good output, that is very important. No problems with administration. Easy to do, fast to crawl. | - |
| Search Tool |
rating
|
how |
What works well about this site search tool? | Any problems or issues with this site search tool? |
This survey is copyright © 1999 by Search Tools Consulting, and all rights are reserved. The survey was designed, analyzed and reported by Avi Rappoport. Personal information in the survey will be kept private at all times. For reprint permissions or survey aggregate data purchase, please contact Search Tools Consulting.
This work is licensed for redistribution under a Creative Commons Attribution - Share Alike 3.0 License.