[WEB4LIB] Cross-campus searching

[Avi Rappoport]

Hi Sika,

Almost all search engines and services let you do that now, Google 
will too if you pay them!

A lot depends on whether you want to spend money for a low-end 
commercial search engine with admin tools so a librarian can control 
it, or whether you want to invest sys admin resources in an open 
source search engine -- there are good arguments both ways.

I've heard mixed reviews of Alkaline, some people were not so happy 
with bugs and lack of support.

If you're on Windows, do give Alkaline a try, along with MondoSearch, 
dtSearch, ASPSeek, the free open source SWISH-E and the high end 
search engines such as the Google Search Appliance, FAST Data Search 
and Inktomi Enterprise Search.

On Unix, I recommend that you look at Alkaline from Vestris and 
Thunderstone Webinator, which have  reasonable admin interfaces. 
HomePageSearchEngine and Subject Search Server are inexpensive but 
require you to use command lines and configuration files.  There are 
also some free open-source search engines, if you don't mind 
compiling code: ASPSeek, ht://Dig, SWISH-E and mnoGoSearch.  And of 
course Google, Inktomi, AltaVista and FAST Data Search.

Feel free to contact me directly for more advice,

Avi

At 10:06 AM -0700 10/2/02, Sika Berger wrote:
>Web4Lib'ers,
>
>I am looking for free (or at the least low-maintenance) search engines
>that can be easily configured to search multiple domains.   There are
>two or three questions here, please offer any tidbit of info. you may
>have...
>
>Our campus is part of a five college consortium, and we'd like to set up
>a "search our site" feature that looks across all the libraries'
>websites, perhaps also presenting options to restrict to all the
>libraries' "policies" or "research" sub-directories.

...

>Finally, any experience with Alkaline?  I've searched their online
>support postings and found some encouraging comments.
>http://alkaline.vestris.com/
>
>**********
>
>Thanks!
>
>Sika Berger

-- 
Complete Guide to Search Engines for Web Sites and Intranets
    <http://www.searchtools.com>