Free Search Engine Comparison by Yiling Chen, revised April 2006, compares Alkaline, Fluid Dynamics, ht://Dig, Juggernautsearch, mnoGoSearch, Perlfect, SWISH-E, Webinator, and Webglimpse, concentrating on indexing, query processing, retrieval, and relevance.
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.
