A comprehensive set of instructions including background information, choosing the right site search engine for your site, testing and installing the software, designing the interface, and setting up a maintenance program. Includes many links to sites and products, summaries of some of the most attractive programs and an example of the installation process using the DNA Files web site.
Describes the problems with finding information in corporate intranets, strategies by companies and vendors to improve the situation. Options include more training, concept mapping approaches and directory cataloging (like Yahoo).
Extremely thoughtful overview including the "right questions" to ask when choosing a search tool for an intranet, how to develop an implementation plan, and a table of comparisons among QuickFinder (Novell intraNetWare), Microsoft Index Server and Netscape Compass Server.
Description of the benefits and issues of site search tools, including indexers vs. crawlers. Covers the features of iHound, Boolean Search, Phantom and WebSTAR Search.
March 26, 1998 by Judy BrownCovers the history of Web search engines, how indexing robots approach pages, subject directories (also called categories), defining site needs, dealing with legacy data, background on evaluating search engines, listings of various options including platform and file format compatibility, and thoughts for the future.
Reviews of 30 web site search engines in 10 industries: Computer Hardware, Computer Software, Telecommunications, Retail, Consumer Goods, General Manufacturing, Financial Planning/Insurance, Newspaper, Government, Education. Features commended including ease of use, speed, good recall and precision, helpful summaries, clear presentation of advanced features such as filters, results sorting, "area match" and organization (information architecture), targeted features (price-range searching at Wal-Mart), user tips, tolerance of spelling errors.
Helpful and up-to-date information, including the amount of time required for maintenance and administration, formats supported, data location, user requirements, relevancy and performance.
Excerpts from the excellent book Information Architecture for the World Wide Web describe how to support different modes of searching, integrate search with browsing, conform to your site's design, and clarify search options.
Good overview of site searching in corporate Intranet sites. Describes why some sites need more than traditional Boolean searching, multimedia file formats, and canned searches, featuring Dataware products. Covers performance and hardware capacity issues.
Eye for Design, 1998 by Jared SpoolProvocative article shows several examples of bad search interface design. Includes examples of problems with confusing substring searching, having search help on a separate page, misspellings, unclear results, confusing page titles in results listings, and a lack of indexing which finds pages that match the words but not the meaning of the queries.
How to provide information-finding tools for local and remote data. Describes robots, keyword and concept-based indexing. Includes a small table of Search Tools on the second page.
A wide-ranging book covering everything from the beginnings of the robot spiders crawling and indexing the web to analysis of the major webwide search engines to detailed information on installing and configuring six local site search tools. The programs covered are AltaVista Search Intranet, Excite for Web Servers, Harvest, ht://Dig, Phantom and Ultraseek. Also describes BDDBot: An ongoing collaborative project, to create a Java web server and search spider, using open source under the GNU public license. Use these links to buy from Amazon or Computer Literacy and you'll support this site.
Overviews of Site Search Tools from an industry point of view, includes information on search engines, new forms of visualization, collaborative filters, enterprise use of these tools, and corporate info.
Describes the issues of indexing and searching video data, which is much harder than text. Algorithms must find meta patterns, such as scene changes, to break down the data into manageable parts -- and these are different in different genres of video, such as documentaries or sports. Products make good use of closed-captioned text, text within the video and analysis of audio tracks to create storyboards and previews. More subtle indexing will require image analysis and pattern recognition. Products also work with Microsoft's NetShow streaming audio and video products. Includes information about Excalibur, Virage and Magnifi.
Why and how to choose a site search tool, covering both commercial and free/shareware options.
Good article on the process of selecting and implementing site search tools, aimed mainly at Unix webmasters. Includes a table of features for various tools.
Web Architect considers issues of navigation and organization of sites to avoid the need for searching tools.
Describes the search-and-retrieval industry status, including the extension towards knowledge management.
Describes progress in attitudes towards site search tools. Example of CE Software, which uses the Excite search engine and says that it accounts for 24% of all scripts on the site. Other advice from the Interactive Media Group is to limit the scope of the search engine to specific topics, such as catalogs or product lists.
Web Architect describes the details of implementing and maintaining web site search tools.
Describes web site search engine products which are aimed at intranets rather than public sites using search agents, expanded capacity and web publishing of legacy data. Covers Netscape Compass Server 3.0, Verity IntelliServ, AltaVista Search Intranet Extension '97 and Odyssey Isys:web.
Describes trends in search engine technology such as indexing realtime data, including news feeds and email; visualization tools for clustering and explaining data.
Search tools information from users and developers, including SemioMap, Infoseek Ultraseek, AltaVista Intranet, Excalibur RetrievalWare, OpenText LiveLink, Fulcrum Knowledge Network and Verity push technology from Cognisoft.
Very helpful results of research on web site usability finds that half of all users are "search-dominant" (they use the search field as soon as they can). Recommendations are to put a search button on every page, to index the entire site rather than selected documents, and to avoid requiring Boolean operators in the default search .
Overviews of important issues such as reliability, flexibility, simplicity, natural-language interfaces, summarization, probability methods, Boolean searching, proximity and co-occurance, image and other data types, security, and more. Descriptions of how Hewlett-Packard uses Verity, the Saint Joseph Public Library uses FileMaker Pro, Physicians' Online uses Excalibur RetrievalWare, and the Library of Congress uses Sovereign Hill's InQuery.
Looks promising but is currently out of print and unavailable.
Good article covering the basic issues of choosing a site search tool, chart describing both commercial and free/shareware options.
Good evaluations of the technical underpinnings of the indexing and search tools for intranets. Covers Verity Knowledge Base Network, Open Text LiveLink, Frontier Technologies CyberSearch, Infoseek Ultraseek, Inktomi's HotBot, Lycos/Inmagic, AltaVista Intranet.
Helpful discussion of the issues in setting up an intranet search system, including search techniques, indexing, operating systems, crawling, data types, database access, images, results formatting, concept clustering and agents. Provides practical tips on how to choose a system.
Slightly elderly but still useful checklist of the various options for site search including integrated server search, separate applications, CGI scripts, applets and subsets of webwide search engines.
Comprehensive coverage of both webwide and local site searching with robot spiders as of 1996. See in particular section 4.2, Analysis of full text retrieval systems and Annex 3: Analysis of fulltext retrieval software.
Information about a research report series on text information retrieval systems, including enterprise ROI information, search techniques, standards information, multimedia and so on.
Good Overviews with useful descriptions of the technical issues of site search tools.
Elderly (dated 1996) but thoughtful commentary on site search technology.
Good coverage of issues of very large document collections, including compression, indexing and querying options. See also the MG web site and the excellent reviews.
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