Thunderstone Blog: Customized Search Engine & Search Software

New features include

Rank Bias

Parametric profiles gain new capabilities to set a bias on a per document field using data from field rules.  This allow documents to be biased up or down in the search results, for example PDF results could be biased down, or documents with "Important" in a meta tag could be ranked higher.

Improvements

Content Repositories

Azure Blob Storage support was added for crawling content stored in Azure Blobs.

File Share Robustness

Network shares are remounted if needed at the start of a crawl.

Audit Logging

The ability to log all setting modifications was added to aid with auditing setting changes.

Other fixes

Miscellaneous other bug fixes and enhancements to the crawl and search interfaces.  See the announcement on the message board for full details.

Availability

Search Appliance Version 20 is available to all Search Appliance and Parametric Search Appliance customers who have a current maintenance plan by following the menu System / System Setup / Update Software.

Webinator Version 20 is available to all Webinator customers who have a current maintenance plan by contacting Thunderstone.

For 36 years Thunderstone Software has been dedicated to providing the best search solutions possible to government, corporate, and non-profit customers, with exceptional service and devotion to finding the right solution for the customer.

For further information call +1 216-820-2200, visit www.thunderstone.com.

New features include

Entity Recognition

Parametric profiles gain new capabilities to extract information from document text. Now even documents with no metadata can contribute terms to faceted navigation, via entity recognition. For example, a list of terms, e.g. cities or manufacturers, can be defined for extraction and then searched or grouped by. Or a regular expression can be crafted to match a specific pattern of data — e.g. a defined syntax for part or social security numbers. And the XML syntax for such entities is largely compatible with GSA syntax, making upgrading a snap.

Improvements

Dashboard Statisitics

Several new statistics have been added to help monitor activity, including the search rate, fetch rate, and document growth rate so you can identify problems that may arise in the future.

Unmount Shares

Network shares can now be unmounted without removing the settings.

XSS Protection fix

Browsers may have warned on the settings page about possible XSS problems.  There was no vulnerability in the appliance, and the settings were updated correctly, however now the XSS warnings no longer are triggered.

Other fixes

Miscellaneous other bug fixes and enhancements to the crawl and search interfaces including result counts and some REX expression handling.  See the announcement on the message board for full details.

Availability

Search Appliance Version 19 is available to all Search Appliance and Parametric Search Appliance customers who have a current maintenance plan by following the menu System / System Setup / Update Software.

Webinator Version 19 is available to all Webinator customers who have a current maintenance plan by contacting Thunderstone.

For 36 years Thunderstone Software has been dedicated to providing the best search solutions possible to government, corporate, and non-profit customers, with exceptional service and devotion to finding the right solution for the customer.

For further information call +1 216-820-2200, visit www.thunderstone.com.

CLEVELAND, OH, February 1, 2016 — Improving the quality of search for intranet, public facing websites and aggregator sites -- Thunderstone Search Appliance and Webinator Version 16 is here.

New crawl features include

Additional authorization options

If you have websites that require user authentication, the latest version of the Search Appliance and Webinator include support for:

• Central Authentication Service (CAS): These form-based logins may now be crawled simply with a user name and password, without needing to create custom authentication rules.
• Negotiate Kerberos option authentication is now supported for crawls.

Simplified crawl configuration

In addition to CAS, version 16 also adds support for:

• Sitemaps allowing easier crawling of sites where URLs are not easily determined from a crawl.
• XML/XSL site support by applying stylesheets to sites that deliver content via XML and XSL instead of HTML; the searchable text is better identified.
• Proxy Auto-config (PAC) file support which makes it easier to index and crawl enterprises composed of different networks with varying proxy rules: the same config files used by browsers may now be used at crawl time.
• The Ajax crawlable URL scheme from Google is supported, allowing Ajax based dynamic sites that support it to be crawled and indexed more effectively.

Additional fixes and enhancements

In addition improvements have been made to the administrative interface as well as some file-format processing.

Availability

Search Appliance Version 16 is available to all Search Appliance and Parametric Search Appliance customers who have a current maintenance plan by following the menu System / System Setup / Update Software.

Webinator Version 16 is available to all Webinator customers who have a current maintenance plan by contacting Thunderstone.

For 34 years Thunderstone Software has been dedicated to providing the best search solutions possible to government, corporate, and non-profit customers, with exceptional service and devotion to finding the right solution for the customer.

For further information call +1 216-820-2200, visit www.thunderstone.com.

CLEVELAND, OH — Making it even easier to integrate high quality search into your website -- Webinator Version 13 is here.

New features include:

• Query Autocomplete, guides your users to the search they want
• HTML Highlighting, lets users see the results in the original HTML for better contextual information
• Expanded XML/SOAP API allows integration of administrative interface
• And much more: see the Webinator home page for full details

For 34 years Thunderstone Software has been dedicated to providing the best search solutions possible to government, corporate, and non-profit customers, with exceptional service and devotion to finding the right solution for the customer.

For further information call +1 216-820-2200, visit www.thunderstone.com.

CLEVELAND, OH — Making it even easier to integrate high quality search into your website -- Webinator Version 6 and Search Appliance Version 8 are here.

New features include:

• More intuitive searches, including Unicode support and accent-insensitive queries:
  This improves non-English searches; e.g. "cœur" will also match "coeur", "resume" will match "resumé".
• Enhanced search results, including multiple snippets and styled highlighting.
• XML/SOAP API to ease integration of search into dynamic sites.
• Meta Search to allow searching multiple profiles together in one transaction.
• Results Authorization so unauthorized documents don't show up in search results.
• HTTP/1.1 support including gzip compression to reduce crawl times and bandwidth utilization:
  Reduces load on targeted servers, and potentially allows access to more content.
• And much more: see the full list of new features here.

For 30 years Thunderstone Software has been dedicated to providing the best search solutions possible to government, corporate, and non-profit customers, with exceptional service and devotion to finding the right solution for the customer.

For further information call +1 216-820-2200, visit www.thunderstone.com or email