Specs for search engines?

[Andrzej Kowalski]

At 05:42 08/21/96 -0700, KAREN SCHNEIDER wrote:
>If you were going to purchase a search engine for your
>rapidly-growing library website, with an eye to delivering a large
>number of electronic documents and other resources to a
>heterogenous community, what would you look for?  
>
>Or, put another way--am I on the right track here?  
>
>*  It should support structured and unstructured searches

Absolutely.  This is the show stopper for many systems and the fundamental
issue we have tried to address with our KE Texpress product.  Generally
speaking, systems that handle structured data well can't do indexed key word
retrieval across large passages of unstructured text i.e. documents. Some
add on text products text products are appearing for relational products,
but as separate engines they don't integrate the free text well with the
structured data types. Structured systems quite often require you to do slow
wildcard searches to find keywords within fields less than 256 characters,
unless you provide all of the leading words.

Conversely, you don't use free text products to manage your catalogue.

>*  It should have highly configurable output

Yes.  It would also be advantageous if it would support insert, update and
delete functions through Web forms, rather than query only, for all those
Intranet sites you will build when you jump on that bandwagon.

>*  It should kick butt.  ;-)

As always. 

How about if it also provided enhanced auditing over and above standard Web
logs e.g. number of records retrieved, accurate description of query terms
and more?

>
>Karen G. Schneider/US EPA Region 2 Library
>schneider.karen at epamail.epa.gov
>opinions mine alone
>


Andrzej Kowalski
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Andrzej Kowalski
KE Software Inc.
andrzej at kesoftware.com                                   
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