selecting a search engine for a library web site

[Steve Sloan (HIL)]

Certainly one of the most powerful search engines available 
is the LiveLink product from OpenText.  It's not free, or even 
cheap.  But it is very flexible, fast, scales well to large indexes,
supports HTML, ASCII, SGML, WP, PDF and comes with a 
spider.

We bought the product at the University of New Brunswick 
for use in our Electronic Text Centre.   

http://www.lib.unb.ca/Main/Texts.html

Sure, it indexed the English Poetry Database (SGML) and the 
Telegraph Journal (tagged ASCII) fine.  But it has also been 
useful for a number of smaller projects.

[If you look at the Telegraph Journal sample database, don't
blame the display problems on the search engine.  The data we
recived from the newspaper was not in a consistent format, making 
formating difficult.]

Check out, for example, the Maliseet Dictionary or our index
to our Loyalist Collection Inventory.

We used the spider to index all the UNB Web servers:
http://www.lib.unb.ca/text2/spider/UNB_spider_search.html

If anyone would like more details I'd be happy to contribute
more to the list or to send a personal reply.

Stephen Sloan
Systems Librarian
University of New Brunswick Libraries
Fredericton, Canada 
> I am leading efforts to select a new engine for our organizations web
> site.  JEFFLINE [URL:jeffline.tju.edu] currently uses WAIS.  I have
> checked the Web4Lib archives and found little on selecting a search
> engine, most of the materials I found were evaluating search engines such
> as LYCOS, InfoSeek, etc.
> 
> I have a found a few good articles via an online search but would
> appreciate any help (first-hand experience or good web or print resources.
> 
> Thank you
> 
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>  Thomas Jefferson University		  | http://oac1.oac.tju.edu/~blakely1/
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