[Sunhelp] Search engine

[James Lockwood]

On Sat, 19 Jun 1999, David Fickes wrote:

> Not necessarily in that order. As for my needs, I need something
> like WAIS which allows me to get a list of email documents in
> the various folders and then pulls up that specific email message
> in the folder. WASI does this well but its GUI components don't seem
> to cut the mustard AND its not getting much development or attention.

Isearch includes a module to parse mailbox format messages, this also lets
you index on various header fields (so you can match on foo at bar.baz in the
From: header only, for instance).

WAIS is dead, effectively.  FreeWAIS is still alive and kicking but never
had the quality and speed of the commercial releases.  For your purposes,
Z39.50 compatability is a nonissue, which is what much of WAIS is (and
what AOL bought WAIS for in the first place).

I'm not sure exactly what you're after.  Do you want a GUI querytool as
well as the text engine itself?  Would a web-driven interface be a
reasonable possibility?  There are TK frontends to all of the above listed
engines, but quality is variable.

> Of course, to have a system that goes over web documents that I've saved
> and even possibly to somoe outside resources .. that would be terrific.

All of these are capable of that.  Glimpse is a natural fit for this in
conjunction with the Harvest Gatherer and comes this way "out of the box". 
Same goes for WAIS and SWISH (support added recently).  Isearch with my
SOIF parser will do this as well, but the downside is that it doesn't fit
into the Harvest Broker model yet (you have to use Isearch query tools
instead of the Harvest query tools).  If you can find a Z39.50 front-end
that you really like then you may want to go with Zebra or FreeWAIS, but I
expect that much of the functionality of Z39.50 will not be needed.

Harvest seems to be the best spider for small to medium collections that
I've seen.  Look out for the multithreaded version coming RSN by yours
truly.

-James