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October 2000 Survey Results
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| SearchTool | rating | how long | date reported | What about this search tool works well? | Any problems or issues with this search tool? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alkaline | 5 | 6 months | 07/1999 | It does what I want and does not pretend to do more. It's easy to install and it's free. | - |
| 2 | 1 year | 11/1999 | Fast searches Handles PDF files well | Timeouts in some versions. Bugs in current version. Support agreement not forthcoming | |
| 2 | 3 months | 10/1999 | - | - | |
| AltaVista | 4 | 2 years | 09/1999 | AV currently provides a broader search | I am somewhat distressed that it does not recognize Dublin Core meta tags. |
| 2 | 3 months | 04/2000 | indexes pdf files | - | |
| 1 | 3 months | 01/2000 | - | we have not been able to optimize it for our site. we have multiple feeds (news, weather, entertainment) and these always surface before any real meaty relevant pages | |
| Apple e.g. | 2 | 3 years | 03/2000 | Very good stemming, intelligent searches, high quality returns | It crashes; not supported, but we can't find anything better. We're looking and all of the Mac products have problems. |
| 1 | 1 year | 06/2000 | serves up pages reasonably closely related to the query | crashes the machine | |
| 1 | ?? | 01/2000 | - | It takes a very long time to return any pages, and when it serves up the page, the url changes nightly, so that pages are not bookmarkable | |
| Beseen | 2 | 6 months | 05/2000 | It is easy to find on the site and customizes the display of the information in order of relevancy. | It slows down the download of the pages considerable and sometimes will not load at all or create a backup and will information is lost. |
| 2 | 3 months | 12/1999 | - | I have to specifically instruct it to reindex when new information is added and it can only be reindex once every seven days | |
| SearchTool | rating | how long | date reported | What about this search tool works well? | Any problems or issues with this search tool? |
| DBtextworks Intranet Spider | 3 | 2 months | 04/1999 | 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 |
| Fluid Dynamics | 4 | 1 week | 08/1999 | Good output, that is very important. No problems with administration. Easy to do, fast to crawl. | - |
| 2 | 3 months | 02/1999 | 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. | |
| 1 | 3-4 months | 03/2000 | Easy set up and template design. | Multiple directory levels cause problems and number of directories slows it down. | |
| Freefind | 5 | 3 months | 07/2000 | weekly report of search keywords | - |
| 5 | 3 months | 04/1999 | 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.) | |
| 4 | 3 months | 04/2000 | Retrieves correct pages | Search for phrases and particularly phrases within Goto options tag .. eg search for "British Horse Society" brings up pages with many instances of British or Horse but the page which contains "British Horse Society" in a Goto option tag does not come up in position No 1. | |
| 2 | 1 week | 04/2000 | Indexes pages well | Search is too simple: No boolean operators; does not index text embedded in links | |
| 1 | 2 days | 03/2000 | for free, very easy to instal | no use of wildcards possible | |
| Fulcrum (now Hummingbird) | 2 | 2 years | 08/1999 | fast, has vendor API | hard to maintain, not many new features, vanilla keyword searching, low throughput/not scalable |
| 2 | 1 month | 07/2000 | - | - | |
| Harvest | 3 | 3 years | 03/2000 | Searching performance is good! Very flexible | can't do fuzzy search,only keywords |
| 2 | 4 years | 11/1999 | - | - | |
| 2 | 4 years | 04/1999 | - | will no longer cope with newer developments, specifically can't cope with http v1.1 on server so much of site no longer indexed | |
| HitBox Search | 1 | 1 year | 09/2000 | fast | they don't re-index pages |
| HomePageSearch applet | 2 | 5 months | 08/2000 | Free, easy and works | Much too slow |
| Hotlinks | 4 | 1 month | 12/1998 | - | - |
| Hyperseek | 1 | 1 year | 11/1999 | - | complicated to install and update - complicated user interface - to expensive |
| SearchTool | rating | how long | date reported | What about this search tool works well? | Any problems or issues with this search tool? |
| IBM NetQuestion | 1 | 6 months | 09/2000 | Very little [good] | Many symbols (eg. UK pound sign) not searchable. Differences in results returned between browsers. Keyword search only (limited to 5 words). Slow. Limited information about returned results. Ranking of results cannot be modified and seems random. |
| iCat | 1 | 4 weeks | 05/1999 | - | questionable returns, obscure syntax, lack of insight into indexer |
| ICE | 3 | not yet | 06/1999 | it will be fast. It requires a keyword index; I'm trying to come up with a way to pick out proper people and place names to also treat as keywords. | [adaptation using ASP (perlscript, vbscript) and SQL DB] Difficult and time-consuming to implement |
| 2 | 2 years | 01/2000 | Reasonably fast | Prefer more options for user | |
| 2 | 8 months | 04/2000 | Fast, easy to install & Customise, Free | Not terribly accurate, too dependant on titles and META tags, lack of configurablility | |
| iFilter | 4 | 6 months | 07/1999 | indexes CONTENT of PDF files | periodic incompatibilities between Adobe and Microsoft |
| Inquery 5.0 (beta) | 4 | 3 months | 01/1999 | - | - |
| Intelligent Miner for Text | 2 | 1 year | 07/2000 | - | no Java API not enough sort criteria |
| Lotus Search Engine | 1 | 6 months | 09/2000 | - | - |
| Lycos Site Spider 1.0 | 2 | 8 months | 02/1999 | Easy to configure, returns results quickly | will not do "Fuzzy" or "Like" searches. Seems to be case sensitive. |
| SearchTool | rating | how long | date reported | What about this search tool works well? | Any problems or issues with this search tool? |
| Muscat | 3 | 2+ years | 08/1999 | ranks pages for relevance | ISP is about to withdraw this service |
| 2 | 3 years | 10/2000 | Search only within the website | Graphics and search results display is poor | |
| 2 | 2 months | 10/2000 | - | - | |
| 1 | 2 years | 07/2000 | It's probabalistic | Doesn't find things well, not query from database, doesn't search e-commerce areas and directories, and results are not sorted in date order | |
| NetIS | 5 | 2 years | 09/1999 | Full text search with advanced search options (wildcards, proximity, boolean etc.) Hit highlighting + pinpoint navigation Ability to fully customize the looks & feel + data display (for the user as well) through usage of CSS Ability to deal with super big databases Ability to do web-publishing through our engine Abiloity to perform page-sensitive banners and many more | NO. |
| NT INDEXER | 2 | 2 weeks | 08/2000 | Searches for words and phrases in documents stored on the web server | Does not update search results in real-time - must catalogue the web site. |
| OfficeVision/400 | 4 | 10 years | 07/1999 | Combined search of content and object descriptions | IBM are withdrawing support |
| Oracle ConText | 1 | 1 year | 03/2000 | No special entry rules | Need to search content of pages (HTML), not just titles. |
| Oracle InterMedia | - | not yet | 05/2000 | - | - |
| Perlfect | 4 | 1 month | 09/2000 | Simple to install (also on more virtual servers) and easy to configure | nope, but maybe too little features |
| 2 | 1 Year | 01/2000 | Ease of use | Too generic the results returned. | |
| Phantom | 4 | 1 month | 03/1999 | Robot | not yet |
| 3 | 3 years | 12/1998 | Easy to customize Multiple logical indexes | Crawling is slow Data file is fragile- not robust | |
| 1 | - | 10/2000 | - | - | |
| PicoSearch | 2 | 1 year | 06/2000 | quick and easy | no longer works |
| 2 | 1 week | 06/1999 | quick | never updated | |
| - | 1 day | 08/1999 | - | - | |
| SearchTool | rating | how long | date reported | What about this search tool works well? | Any problems or issues with this search tool? |
| PLWeb | 1 | 3 months | 03/1999 | template configuration | big probblems creating a large index, data can only be added incementally |
| ResourceMiner | 2 | 3 years | 08/2000 | It can do a content, natural language query and opens the PDF to the exact page of the hit. The hit words are highlighted. | Biggest problem is it only searches PDFs. It is hard for people to understand a natural language query when they are used to simple word matching. |
| Sambar | 2 | 1 month | 08/2000 | - | can't spider other sites |
| Search Light | 3 | 2 months | 05/1999 | - | - |
| Sinky Search Engine | 1 | 2 months | 07/1999 | Nothing | I does not display any thing expcet the query in in the address bar |
| Site Server | 5 | 6 months | 04/1999 | Speed, Indexable properties | - |
| 3 | 1 month | 10/1999 | GOOD | - | |
| 2 | 2 years | 08/2000 | - | - | |
| SiteMiner | 2 | 1 month | 11/1999 | - | - |
| 1 | 1 day | 03/2000 | Ease of set up. Includes www search as well. | This site does not combine an index that includes my 4 different URL's. | |
| SQL tablescans | 2 | 1 week | 10/2000 | The amount of content is small enough so that it performs reasonably | It is a temporary solution, much functionality is needed and when sote load and content increase it will not work. |
| SearchTool | rating | how long | date reported | What about this search tool works well? | Any problems or issues with this search tool? |
| unknown | 3 | 3 months | 10/2000 | all | ok |
| WAIS | 3 | 4 years | 03/1999 | fast, easy to administer, contols of "look and feel" with templates, etc. | 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 | 01/1999 | - | slow | |
| 2 | 3 years | 01/1999 | - | 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] | |
| WebBoard | 4 | don't know | 10/2000 | Over all the Oreilly's WebBoard is a good package, but the search tool doesn't search document attatchments. | search tool doesn't search document attatchments. |
| WebIndex / WebFind | 1 | 5 years | 06/2000 | It doesn't work very well at all. | It returns a very long list and often the list of items is irrelavent. Doesn't provide enough information about the file. Doesn't search the mega tags. |
| 1 | 3 years | 05/1999 | 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 | 1 year | 02/1999 | 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. |
| WhatUSeek | 3 | 1 year | 12/1999 | Keyword search | Lack of updating |
| 2 | 6 months | 04/2000 | it's there. has soundex... | cannot sort by date. indexes different number of pages each time spidering done.. no help link... no email contact for help. | |
| 1 | 6 months | 09/2000 | - | I suspect there is some limit, but I have no documentation or statement from the search provider. |
This survey is copyright © 1998-2003 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.