Details of the Summer User Conference in Cleveland, Ohio, USA, have
been posted on our web site, and the cut-off date for group rates at
the hotel is July 8th, so book soon.
Thunderstone users and administrators are invited to learn more
about indexing content with the Search Appliance and Webinator, as well
as creating advanced web applications with Texis and Vortex.
Topics in brief are:
Day 1: Crawling for web/enterprise search and customizing output.
Day 2: Vortex scripting.
Day 3: Advanced Texis.
These are among the new capabilities recently added to Texis, the Search Appliance, Webinator, and/or Texis Web Script (Vortex).
Data from Field.
During a crawl, you can now perform
automatic search and replace on data within documents before they are
indexed. For example, if your documents don't have useful titles, you
can extract a title from the meta data or body. Or extract dates to
replace what a webserver sets if that is known to be wrong (a common
problem - see discussion of "last-modified" dates in the Fall
2003 Thunderstone News). For finding the desired content, the
search criteria may be any Metamorph query including regular expression
(REX), providing versatile pattern matching abilities.
Duplicate Check Fields.
The Appliance/Webinator duplicate
removal capability has some new options. You now can designate one or
more fields to be compared. For example, you might want to designate
documents as duplicates if they have identical body content, even if
their titles are different, or vice versa. The available comparison
fields are: Title, Description, Keywords, Meta, Body.
Uploadable Thesaurus.
The Search Appliance now has an easy
way to load a custom thesaurus file from. You may designate a different
thesaurus for each profile (index collection). The new feature appears
on the Maintenance page.
Email reports.
The
notification after a walk (crawl) can now deliver the walk logs
automatically as email attachments.
Script copyright notice turned off.
New Vortex
distributions no longer put a copyright comment at top of the HTML
output source code. End-users won't see a difference, but this helps
developers generate fully standards compliant web pages. The change
possibly could affect web sites that use Vortex output as input into
another presentation program. Existing customers who would like to have
the comment turned off may request an update from Tech Support.
Thunderstone's Search Appliance is cited for "simplicity, low cost
of ownership, and extensibility" in an independent analysis published
by the Patricia Seybold Group.
The new report is part of the Group's research series about search
solutions for enterprises, e-commerce, and customer service.
The Search Appliance is "designed to eliminate nearly all installation
and maintenance efforts, create a highly reliable and extensively
tested environment (shared by hundreds of customers), and keep support
pricing at an absolute minimum," wrote the report's author, Susan E.
Aldrich, Senior Vice President and Senior Consultant of Patricia
Seybold Group. "We're impressed with the approach, she added.
The 17-page report also looks at the Texis
suite of developer tools for custom search applications. Search
Appliance customers may optionally upgrade to Texis if and when their
needs become more specialized. This upgrade path contributed to the
report's praise for the Search Appliance's "extensibility."
The research was undertaken as part of Patricia Seybold Group's
ongoing services for its clients who are technology buyers.
Thunderstone Software did not sponsor or fund the project.
However, we have obtained permission to distribute complimentary copies
to our customers or prospective customers. Please request a copy
via customer support.
Also IT Week Magazine
performed a series of tests of the Thunderstone Search Appliance.
The result was an "Editor Choice" award. The report appears in
the May 30, 2005 issue, page 53.
Feedback, suggestions and questions are welcome to
