About Master.com

You may have noticed the logos embedded within our site and wondered what they were about.

For many years Thunderstone provided its free site indexing service as a way to do a quick demo of our Webinator Site indexing software. It was pretty popular, and thousands of web sites took advantage of it. The folks from Master.com had a business plan to provide the same kind of service, but with many other free applications and a whole lot more finesse than ours. They also offered to offload the maintenance of our existing sites as well.

To make a long story short, we liked their plan so much that we invested in their company and provided them with the framework for many of the Texis applications that they needed.

Master.com can provide your site a bunch of applications like (described in more detail below):

• A global web search engine

• Auctions

• Classifieds

• Message boards

• Customized news feed and search

• Tailored Polls and questionnaires

• Event scheduler

• A search engine for your site

The reason we are using their services is because they represent a showcase of Thunderstone demos, and it's easier for us. You might like them too. Give Master.com a try.

The following example products demonstrate some of the types of programs that can be written using Thunderstone's Texis Web Script (Vortex). To demo any of these example products, click here.

Open Directory Search Engine


This engine searches the Open Directory Project's growing catalog of over 4 million web sites. The raw data is offered by Open Directory as RDF/XML data files. Our search engine downloads this data, converts it into a Texis database, and provides a categorized, searchable interface.

Site Search


A web crawler written entirely in Vortex, using its ability to fetch and distill pages from web servers, is dispatched to a user specified web site. All of the HTML, text, and PDF files are retrieved and their textual content stored in a database. The user may then perform searches against this dataset. When viewing answers the user may view additional information about the matching document(s), or jump to the original document on the crawled web site.

Message Boards


Among the features that make this more than a simple message service are group types, including public, moderated, and private; message flags, such as public or private; an integrated spell-checker; and the ability to be notified when new messages are added.

Auction & Classifieds


Many of the features that make Texis unique are demonstrated here. Beyond the simple ability to search through the text of the listings, one can also restrict by price, and sort on a number of different fields. This application also shows the ability of Texis to find listings immediately after insertion.

Custom News


A differential web crawler is used to look at front pages of various news sources. New stories are found and indexed. At the same time they are compared against the profiles that users have stored using the profiling features of Texis. The users story list is then updated.