Thunderstone Blog: Customized Search Engine & Search Software

Thunderstone Releases Version 20

Tue, 16 Jan 2018 00:00:00 -0500

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.

Thunderstone Releases Version 19

Mon, 07 Aug 2017 00:00:00 -0400

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

Find a Google Search Appliance Replacement Before It’s Too Late

Fri, 31 Mar 2017 10:28:12 -0400

It’s been over a year since Google announced that they were discontinuing their Search Appliance product, with license renewals officially ending in 2018. While Google Search Appliance is on the way out, there are still many businesses that rely on it for their search. If you’re with a company or organization that does, you should probably start seriously thinking about other options.

Depending on your contract, you only have one or two years of service left. While that sounds like plenty of time, it can fly by when you get wrapped up in work and leave you scrambling to find a proper Google Search Appliance replacement.

It's Time to Replace Google Search Appliance

Have you ever had to scramble to find a gift for someone at the last second? Sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn’t. You don’t want to have hope that a last-minute search appliance decision is going to pan out for your site.

The simple truth is that the more time you have to find a Google Search Appliance alternative, the better choice you can make. You’ll be able to take a stock of what capabilities you need to find in a replacement and do a comprehensive search of your available options. Extra time will also allow you to do test runs of potential Google Search Appliance replacements so you get hands-on experience before you decide.

Time also allows you to reevaluate what you want to get out of your search appliance solution. There may have been elements of Google Search Appliance that you didn’t like, or features you wish it had. Your search for a Google Search Appliance replacement can help you find options that can better fit your needs instead of just mirroring what Search Appliance did.

A Google Search Appliance Replacement Alternative Through Thunderstone

If you’re looking to move on from Google Search Appliance, Thunderstone can help. We provide search technology that can help you fill the Google Search Appliance-shaped hole in your site. In fact, we can do better than just replace it.

We offer solutions like our Thunderstone Search Appliance and Parametric Search Appliance for professionals in need of a straightforward drop-in replacement. Our Webinator search engine software and Texis enterprise search options can provide more complex solutions based on needs, allowing you to invest in a search solution that checks all the boxes on your wish list.

To find out what solution makes sense for your needs, it’s best to talk to an expert. Contact us online or give us a call at 216-820-2200 to learn more about how we can help you replace Google Search Appliance before goes out for good.

Why Switching to Free Google Site Search is a Bad Idea for Business

Tue, 14 Mar 2017 10:19:42 -0400

When Google announced that their site search product would be completely discontinued by April 1, 2017, the news put a lot of businesses in a bind. Now businesses with Google Site Search will have until the end of their license to decide to switch to Google’s free replacement option – Google Custom Search – or make the switch to a different site search product.

The easy switch to free Google Custom Search may be tempting, but there are serious drawbacks that may hurt your business or organization. Here are three reasons why you shouldn’t opt for Google’s free version of site search.

Google Custom Search Has Ads

Google Custom Search is free for a reason. This free site search is funded by the appearance of ads. This is a major problem.

The point of a site search is to allow your users to find relevant information on your site. Google Custom Search can do that, but not before it shows your users a bunch of related ads first. For example, we did a search for “seminars” on a site with Google Custom Search. Look at the results.

The first thing that pops up are links for seminars. The problem is that they’re all for seminars on competitor sites. That’s the last thing you want your users to see.

Thanks to ads, your users are essentially searching your site and the rest of the internet as well. In this case, the competitor ads even pushed the rest of the results down far enough that your users would have to scroll down to see them. That’s if they haven’t left your site by now to spend their money with your competitors.

We must note that you can make money off the appearance of these ads. However, will it ever be enough to cover the cost of a potential lost customer. Probably not.

You’re at Google’s Mercy

In addition to the issues with ads, you also have little control over how the rest of your search results. Google’s search solutions use the Google algorithm to provide the results that you and your users see. That may not seem like an issue at first, but it might mean that you aren’t getting the best search results possible.

While Google uses its own algorithm, other site search engines allow for customization. This allows you to configure what is crawled and how its crawled. This can provide a better searching experience for your users instead of settling on whatever Google wants to give you.

No Tech Support

With Google Site Search, you could contact Google’s tech support for help in case you had any issues or questions. Free Google Custom Search doesn’t offer tech support, so if you run into any problems, you’re going to be on your own to figure them out.

Time to Find a Google Site Search Replacement

Whether you’re on the fence about Google Custom Search or are considering another option, the truth is that time is ticking. Google Site Search will completely shut down April 1, 2018 and it’s important to do your research on your options. You’ve spent plenty of hard work on your site, so you need to find a site search engine that will work the way you want, look the way you want, and keep your users on your site.

At Thunderstone, we can help you replace Google Site Search with a search solution designed for your specific needs. Contact us online or give us a call at 216-820-2200 to learn more about how we can help your site today.

Thunderstone Releases Version 16

Mon, 01 Feb 2016 00:00:00 -0500

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.

Upgrade from Google Mini with Thunderstone

Tue, 08 Dec 2015 00:00:00 -0500

You don't need to be a big business to get quality service. While the Google Mini was discontinued by Google, Thunderstone still takes care of small- and medium-sized businesses in need of a search appliance by upgrading your old option.

Out With the Old Search Appliance and In With the New

You shouldn't be left out in the cold because your old search appliance was discontinued. Our products are designed with the flexibility to meet your needs. The Thunderstone Search Appliance benefits your organization through:

Increased website ROI
Reduced customer service costs
Increased productivity
Customized configuration and integration

Customers that upgrade to the Thunderstone Search Appliance will receive assistance from our experts during the transition so that you can see the difference for yourself. We also set you up with a 30-day money back guarantee in case the search appliance isn't for you.

Search Appliance Solutions from Thunderstone

We've worked with customers of all shapes and sizes, ranging from government entities to businesses. Google may not cater to smaller organizations, but our premier search appliances can help your business get the results it needs. Contact us online or give us a call at 216-820-2200 for more information about upgrading to Thunderstone.

Thunderstone Releases Search Appliance Version 15

Mon, 02 Nov 2015 00:00:00 -0500

CLEVELAND, OH, November 2, 2015 — Improving the quality of search for intranet, public facing websites and aggregator sites -- Search Appliance Version 15 is here.

New crawl features include

Performance improvements indexing many sites at once: If you are creating a search that indexes many different websites the performance of the indexing has been improved. This will allow for more frequent indexing of such indexes.
MIME type enforcement: When crawling across many sites you may find that the web server may still return content that does not match the Mime Types requested. The setting will now be enforced by the crawler, which can help eliminate a lot of unwanted content from a crawl.
Client Certificate option: The crawler can be given a client SSL certificate to use when crawling HTTPS sites, allowing crawling of sites that use client SSL certificates for authentication.

New search features include

Quotes for Literal option: Allows you to change the meaning of quoting a search term from creating a phrase that is still subject to the normal thesaurus, word form and other linguistic processing to searching for exactly what you typed in, although still case-insensitive.
Improved HTML Highlighting: Lets users see the results in the original HTML for better contextual information with support for more complex HTML.

Availability

Search Appliance Version 15 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.

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

Thunderstone Offers Version 9 of the Thunderstone Search Appliance

Wed, 06 Nov 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Superior Technical Support Continues to Drive Further Product Enhancements

CLEVELAND, OH — Thunderstone Software LLC has released Version 9 of the Thunderstone Search Appliance, adding a number of new features which apply to Thunderstone's entire line of Appliance products, including Thunderstone Parametric Search Appliances. These enhancements include:

Faster Searching — searches return two to three times faster in many cases
Query auto-complete providing suggestions as you type
Content caching to allow users to view off-line content
Improved administrative interface with selectable themes
Walk log archiving for extended period analysis

Whether configured as a Thunderstone Search Appliance SBE (Small Business Edition,) a Thunderstone Search Appliance (Enterprise Edition) or a Thunderstone Parametric Search Appliance, the Appliance comes with:

A one-time, perpetual license that saves customers 40-60 percent (or more) compared to Thunderstone's closest competitor
Two years of included maintenance, easily extended for additional years at affordable annual rates
Superior technical support from software engineers readily accessible to customers by phone, email and message board
No restrictions on indexing third-party websites for user-empowering applications and for competitive intelligence purposes
Ability to fully search targeted repositories (file servers, web servers, intranet/portal servers, database servers, application databases, etc.) and to handle files that exceed 30 MB in size
An attractive Product Investment Protection Program that makes upgrading a breeze, applying 100 percent of the initial Thunderstone product's purchase price to any desired upgrade
Availability as a virtual appliance image to run under a hypervisor to allow for more efficient hardware utilization and manageability

All Thunderstone customers with current Appliance maintenance agreements in place automatically qualify to receive the downloadable Version 9 software update.

Reporters, editors, analysts, I.T. integrators/resellers and prospective customers who would like to see the Thunderstone Search Appliance “in action” may phone Thunderstone at +1 216-820-2200, Monday - Friday, 10 a.m. - 6 p.m. Eastern Time, to arrange a free and personalized product demo. After the scheduled demo, you may also request shipment of a pre-configured Thunderstone Search Appliance that you can thoroughly evaluate in your own unique environment for up to 30 days.

For over 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

Thunderstone Provides Special Competitive Upgrade Offer for Google Mini Owners

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0400

CLEVELAND, OH — August 1, 2012 — Thunderstone announces a new program to assist Google Mini customers looking for a replacement for their current search appliance now that Google has announced the end of the Google Mini.

For customers upgrading to the Thunderstone Search Appliance, Thunderstone will honor the remaining warranty and support contract on the Google Mini as an extension to the standard two year support contract on a Thunderstone Search Appliance. In addition Thunderstone will provide assistance in the migration and a 30-day money back guarantee, so that the entire process is painless.

This will allow customers to install and run the Thunderstone Search Appliance alongside their existing search to experience the additional flexibility and results quality, all without losing any warranty period.

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/gmupgrade or email

Thunderstone Releases Webinator™ Web Index & Retrieval System Version 6 and Search Appliance Version 8 (1)

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0500

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

March 2010 Newsletter

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0400

March 2010 - Archive

PUBLIC SECTOR SEARCH APPLIANCE SAVINGS PROGRAM

As various states are providing appliance rebate programs to encourage consumers to switch to new energy efficient appliances we thought it only appropriate to offer our federal government GSA pricing (a savings of up to 32% over list prices) to all state and local governments to help with their budget constraints this spring.

Call our sales office today at 216-820-2200 to find out how switching to a Thunderstone Search Appliance can save you money today.

CUSTOMER QUOTE OF THE MONTH

"I'm impressed with vortex. You have so much functionality already put in to your language that I had to do by hand in perl." -- Gwen Zanin, Sr. Database Designer, The Chronicle of Higher Education

TECH TIP: NEW VS REFRESH

Once you've completed your first walk, you have a choice of how further walks should be performed. It's a choice between thoroughness and speed.

"New" crawls are started from scratch, just like the initial crawl. It takes your initial URLs, forgets everything else, and finds all the content again. The advantage is that you can be sure that every URL is checked on every walk, but the downside is it takes just as long as your initial walk. If your initial walk wasn't excessively long, this could be a feasible walking strategy.

If your initial walk took a week to finish, you might not want to do a New walk every time, though. Our "Refresh" walk schedules pages based on how often they change. The idea is that if a page hasn't changed in 6 months, we don't need to check it EVERY night. Only a subset of pages are checked on a refresh walk, with the more frequently changing pages checked more often than rarely changing ones.

The advantage of refresh walks is they can complete much faster than New walks, allowing your changing content to be updated much more frequently. The disadvantage is if a rarely-changing page DOES change, it might be a while before the refresh crawl checks it to notice the change.

Which type of walk is appropriate depends on your situation, the size of your content, and how quickly things need updated.

Feedback, suggestions and questions are welcome. Send your email to .

State and Local Governments Offered Search Appliance Savings Program

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0400

CLEVELAND, OH — State and local governments are being offered a chance to reduce their IT budget by buying search solutions at the same price the Federal government negotiated, while at the same time gaining a level of customer service and flexibility that consistently surpasses the levels that have become the industry norm. In addition to these savings they will also save by only needing to license once compared to other solutions that require never-ending periodic relicensing.

The Thunderstone family of search solutions provides the following benefits:

Knowledgeable and accessible technical support. If you have a question or need any assistance call one of our qualified engineers.
A perpetual license, which means once you have the solution you never have to repurchase it.
Full trade-in credit if you need to expand your license.
A flexible range of solutions designed to work the way you want, including appliances, virtual appliances, software and hosted SaaS models.

For almost 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 216-820-2200, visit www.thunderstone.com or email

February 2010 Newsletter

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0500

February 2010 - Archive

AVOIDING COMMON WEAKNESSES

The 2010 CWE/SANS Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors was just released. Many of these most common errors can be avoided by using Vortex properly in your applications. For example:

The use of parameters when constructing SQL statements avoids SQL injection problems, as well as greatly simplifying code.
Vortex removes the need to worry about buffer sizes and array indexes, preventing overflows.
The default Vortex settings are designed to limit resource utilization when crawling and searching. These can of course be changed to suit your needs.

No programming language can prevent all errors, so you are encouraged to use the CWE/SANS list as a checklist when developing your application. If you have any questions about the functions that can help, for example by sanitizing input and output data, you can search our manual or call tech support.

HAPPENINGS

THUNDERSTONE ADDS A NEW PARTNER FOR SEARCH APPLIANCE, WEBINATOR AND TEXIS CATALOG SOLUTION SALES IN NORTH AMERICA AND THE ASIA PACIFIC MARKETS

We welcome the following organization to our growing Thunderstone Reseller/Channel Partner Program:

CustomWare Asia Pacific Pty Ltd
+1 888 707 0088
http://www.customware.net

Sudbury, MA-based freelance writer Paul Korzeniowski quoted Thunderstone's CEO John Turnbull in a January 6, 2010 Network Computing article entitled "Best And Worst Of Times For Enterprise Search." Korzeniowski wrote, in part:

Data expansion has been driving user interest in search systems. In most enterprises, storage requirements have been increasing at healthy rates, 10 percent on the low end and 100 percent in certain cases. "Many companies have generated information that can help employees do their job more efficiently, but often they cannot easily locate that data," stated John Turnbull, president and CEO of Thunderstone Software LLC. Consequently, search system design has been changing.

See http://www.networkcomputing.com/enterprise-search/the-enterprise-search-dichotomy.php for the full article.

TECH TIP: CRAWLING FILE SERVERS WITH YOUR SEARCH APPLIANCE

The Thunderstone Search Appliance isn't just for websites. You can also use it to crawl your file servers. The process is very similar — directories are crawled as "pages" with "links" to other directories and files, and the files themselves are processed just as if they were on a website.

Setup via "Network Filesystems & Shares"

The one difference is any file share needs to be mounted before it can be used in a crawl. The "Network Filesystems & Shares" section is where you manage your various mounts. You specify the server, the share, and the credentials that should be used to crawl it.

Once it's mounted, you'll see a Base URL you can use to crawl that file share. You can specify a subdirectory of the share as the starting point of your crawl, and you can crawl the same share in multiple profiles.

For example, you can mount the "officeDocs" share on your "files3" file server, and have the "hr" profile crawl "file://files3/officeDocs/hr/archive" while the "sales" profile crawls "file://files3/officeDocs/clients", etc.

Next month we'll talk about Results Authorization, which ensures your search users only get results for pages and files they're allowed to see.

Feedback, suggestions and questions are welcome. Send your email to .

January 2010 Newsletter

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0500

January 2010 - Archive

NEW PRICING FOR PARAMETRIC SEARCH APPLIANCES

Thunderstone has lowered prices on Thunderstone Parametric Search Appliances, and the entry-level model supporting 250,000 records or documents is now $20,000.

The Thunderstone Parametric Search Appliance still includes one day of consulting with the purchase, and additional optimization and training services can be purchased to make sure it meets your needs.

All Appliance customers continue to enjoy one-time, perpetual licenses with two years of bundled maintenance and software updates (available in year three and beyond for an optional 18% annual maintenance fee; Thunderstone will never turn off your Appliance just because you choose not to continue the maintenance,) as well as affordable upgrade paths plus superior tech support by phone, email and message board.

Call Thunderstone sales today at +1 216 820 2200 for more information about any Thunderstone hardware or software products, including VMware and hosted (SaaS) Data Services.

HAPPENINGS

New York-based freelance writer Thomas Hoffman included noteworthy input from a Thunderstone Search Appliance customer in his December 29, 2009 Computerworld article entitled "Innovative tech projects won't slow down for some." In the article, distributed via the IDG News Service, Hoffman shared information provided by Russ Finney of Tokyo Electron U.S. Holdings – relating how Thunderstone's advanced technology enables engineers at Tokyo Electron to successfully search many data sources and obtain different query results based on their roles in the company. Finney said, "It's another step forward in knowledge management."

See http://www.thestandard.com/news/2009/12/29/innovative-tech-projects-wont-slow-down-some.

CUSTOMER QUOTE OF THE MONTH

"This search device rocks..."

Brian Michalovic
Director of Internet Services
Sea Gull Lighting (A Generation Brands Company)
http://www.seagulllighting.com/

TECH TIP: SEARCH APPLIANCE TEST PAGE FETCHER

Finding out exactly what's going on – Test Network and Servers

Thunderstone has added a powerful new tool to the Search Appliance, "Test Network and Servers," that makes it easy to troubleshoot URL problems.

It allows you to "test" any given URL for a profile, providing you with information including:

Statistics, such as time elapsed (DNS & content), security used, content-type (and where it came from), characters sets, and more
All headers provided, both HTTP and HTML
Any extracted meta content
All extracted links, and whether they would be included/excluded by the selected profile (and why)
The full formatted text of the page, and optionally the raw pre-processed data

In addition, there are lower-level testing tools for things like:

Resolving network names
Pinging machines
Performing traceroutes
Sending test emails

"Test Network and Servers" can be found under "Maintenance" in the Search Appliance interface.

Feedback, suggestions and questions are welcome. Send your email to .

KMWorld Selects Thunderstone Search Appliance as a "Trend-Setting Product" for 2009

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Powerful, Yet Affordable Line of Search Appliances Continues to Impress

CLEVELAND, OH — Thunderstone Software LLC announced today that KMWorld, a publishing unit of Information Today, Inc., has included the Thunderstone Search Appliance on KMWorld's list of 2009 Trend Setting Products. The annual Trend-Setting Products awards began in 2003. This year KMWorld assessed more than 800 nominated products via a judging panel made up of editorial colleagues, analysts, system integrators, vendors, line-of-business managers and users. According to KMWorld, the 130 products selected all demonstrate clearly identifiable technology breakthroughs that serve the vendors' full spectrum of constituencies – especially customers.

"We've been helping small, medium-sized and large organizations throughout the world to solve their own unique data access and retrieval challenges for 28+ years. So, we understand better than most what works and what doesn't," said John Turnbull, CEO of Thunderstone. "We feel honored to have received this recognition by KMWorld for the ongoing practical innovations we continue to build into our popular line of Thunderstone Search Appliances."

The Thunderstone Search Appliance is a plug-and-play device combining the simplicity of a hosted service with the security and performance of a local solution. Built on Thunderstone's advanced Texis software, the Appliance can handle more than 1,000 typical queries a minute – providing excellent value without adding administrative overhead.

The Thunderstone Parametric Search Appliance combines the flexibility and power of Texis with the ease of use of an appliance. It provides an easy way to create applications that combine full-text and structured data without programming.

a one-time, perpetual license that often saves customers 40-60 percent (or more) compared to Thunderstone's competitors
two years of bundled maintenance, easily extended for additional years at affordable annual rates
superior technical support from software engineers readily accessible to customers by phone, email and message board
no restrictions on indexing third-party websites for user-empowering applications and for competitive intelligence purposes
ability to fully search targeted repositories (file servers, web servers, intranet/portal servers, database servers, application databases, etc.) and to handle files indexed from crawling JavaScript links, files in XML format and files that exceed 30 MB in size
an attractive Product Investment Protection Program that makes upgrading a breeze, applying 100 percent of the initial Thunderstone product's purchase price to any desired upgrade

Reporters, editors, analysts, I.T. integrators, solution providers, value-added resellers and prospective customers who would like to see the Thunderstone Search Appliance "in action" may phone Thunderstone at +1 216 820 2200, Monday - Friday, 10 a.m. - 6 p.m. Eastern Time, to arrange a free and personalized product demo. After the scheduled demo, you may also request shipment of a pre-configured Thunderstone Search Appliance that you can thoroughly evaluate in your own unique environment for up to 30 days.

"We use the Thunderstone Search Appliance to crawl, index and search Word files, PDFs and other content in our law firm's internal document management system. The Appliance gives us a lot of customization options in the way it operates, with excellent control over precisely what we want to make searchable and what we don't want included. It does everything we need it to do. You can just plug it in and forget about it. It works great."

Michael E. Salopek
I.T. Manager
Janik, Dorman & Winter, L.L.P.

"We use a Thunderstone Search Appliance to search our company intranet. It has been a very valuable product to us. Overall, the product is very nice. And with all the customization options, we were able to make the search engine perform the way we wanted it to. Great job on delivering a great product."

Jeremy Townsend
Programmer/Internet Analyst
Perdue Farms Inc.

"Our decision to buy and deploy three Thunderstone Search Appliances saved us hundreds of thousands of dollars in development costs."

Kevin J. Payne
Director of System Applications
U.S. General Services Administration

About KMWorld
KMWorld (KMWorld.com) is the leading information provider serving the Knowledge Management systems market and covers the latest in Content, Document and Knowledge Management, informing more than 50,000 subscribers about the components and processes – and subsequent success stories – that together offer solutions for improving business performance. KMWorld is a publishing unit of Information Today, Inc.

About Thunderstone
As a true industry pioneer – providing some of the world's most powerful, flexible and scalable search solutions since 1981 – Thunderstone Software LLC (http://www.thunderstone.com) has developed hard-to-match expertise in creating high-performance products with tremendous value for governments, NGOs, educational institutions and businesses of all sizes.

Sales contact: Frederick A. Harmon

+1 216 820 2200 ext.105

Media contact: Peter Thusat

+1 216 820 2200 ext.118

May 2009 Newsletter

Sun, 31 May 2009 00:00:00 -0400

May 2009 - Archive

HAPPENINGS

SUPERIOR TECH SUPPORT LEADS TO DEVELOPMENT OF THUNDERSTONE SEARCH APPLIANCE VERSION 7

As a direct response to ongoing practical input from customers who regularly interact with our tech support engineers, Thunderstone Software will release Version 7 of the Thunderstone Search Appliance on June 8, 2009. We've added a number of desirable new features — which also apply to our Parametric Search Appliances and to Thunderstone's entire line of Appliance products. These performance enhancements include:

Faster Category Searching
We've provided a new setting to improve category search speed when categories are distinct/non-overlapping (i.e., when no URL belongs to more than one category.)

Enhanced Federated Search (Thunderstone Meta Search)
Search users can now select which back-end profiles to actually search, from a list configured by their Appliance administrator.

Character Match Mode
Non-English/Unicode character support is greatly improved with this setting, which not only allows case-insensitive searching of foreign characters but also enables ignore-accents ("e" matches "é"), ligature expansion ("oe" matches "œ") and more.

Language Analysis Module
An optional feature for Appliance owners who pay to have it activated, this setting improves CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean) searches with extra processing to put spaces between words so they can be found without wildcards when adjacent to others.

MySQL in DB Walker
We've added support for crawling MySQL databases to our DB Walker.

Updated "Look and Feel"
As well as receiving some improvement from having its text slightly reorganized, the administrative interface also now employs Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for more modern HTML usage.

All Thunderstone customers with current Appliance maintenance agreements in place automatically qualify to receive the downloadable Version 7 software update. Please phone +1 216 820 2200 if you have any questions (business days, 10 a.m. - 6 p.m. Eastern Time.)

CUSTOMER QUOTE OF THE MONTH

“We use our Thunderstone Search Appliance 1000 not for web searching but for internal directory searches of call logs, packing lists, sales lists, invoices, load sheets, etc. People would formerly request needed documents, and we'd have to manually make photocopies and deliver them — which required lots of time and effort. Now that we have a Thunderstone Search Appliance, everybody can search and find what they want quickly and easily. It seems to work very well for what we need.”

Michael Lee
Director of I.T.
Carry-On Trailer Corporation
http://www.carry-ontrailer.com

UPCOMING EVENTS

Thunderstone's R & D team has several other exciting enterprise search development projects in the 2009 pipeline, as our staff continues to work on:

TEXIS Version 6

Webinator Version 6

TEXIS Catalog — our newest eCommerce search engine for online catalogs

Plus, we will continue adding even more features to the Search Appliance products this year. Look for details on all these scheduled releases in future issues of Thunderstone News.

TECH TIPS: USING KEEP/IGNORE TAGS ON YOUR SEARCH APPLIANCE OR WEBINATOR SOFTWARE

Just the Facts, Ma'am — Specifying the content with Keep/Ignore tags

As websites grow larger and more complex, they contain more and more "cruft" that search engines stumble upon. Things that may be small or even hidden by javascript and CSS are front and center to search engines. Standard headers, menus and breadcrumbs are just some of the things that may be polluting your search's data.

Keep Tags and Ignore Tags allow your page authors to indicate what should and shouldn't be used from a webpage. It allows you to trim the fat from your pages so the only thing that gets searched is the content, instead of all the other fluff.

Keep Tags specify a beginning and ending expression, and only the content between the beginning and end are kept. This is performed on the HTML source, so it's common to use comments as the begin/end tags.

Ignore Tags specify a beginning and ending expression, and the content between the beginning and end tags is DISCARDED. This is also performed on the HTML source, so HTML tags/comments are fair game.

Which to use? Both can accomplish the same goal. It's just a question of which will be logistically easier for you. If you have mostly content with just a little bit of extra info, Ignore Tags will probably be easier. If you have a small amount of content awash in a sea of cruft, then putting Keep Tags around the content may be easiest. Plus, you're not limited to using just one or the other. You can also use a combination of Keep Tags and Ignore Tags on your content as you see fit.

Feedback, suggestions and questions are welcome. Send your email to

Thunderstone Offers Version 7 of the Thunderstone Search Appliance

Fri, 01 May 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Superior Technical Support Continues to Drive Further Product Enhancements

CLEVELAND, OH — Thunderstone Software LLC has released Version 7 of the Thunderstone Search Appliance, adding a number of desirable new features — which also apply to Thunderstone Parametric Search Appliances and to Thunderstone's entire line of Appliance products. These performance enhancements include:

Faster URL Category Searching
Thunderstone has provided a new Appliance setting to improve URL category search speed when categories are distinct/non-overlapping (i.e., when no URL belongs to more than one category.)

Enhanced Federated Search (Thunderstone Meta Search)
Search users can now select which back-end profiles to actually search, from a list configured by their Appliance administrator.

Character Match Mode
Non-English/Unicode character support is greatly improved with this setting, which not only allows case-insensitive searching of foreign characters but also enables ignore-accents ("e" matches "é"), ligature expansion ("oe" matches "œ") and more.

Language Analysis Module
An optional feature for Appliance owners who pay to have it activated, this setting improves CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean) searches with extra processing to put spaces between words so they can be found without wildcards when adjacent to others.

MySQL in DB Walker
Thunderstone has added support for crawling MySQL databases to its DB Walker — which already supported Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Sybase and PostgreSQL databases. Administrators can schedule the Appliance to automatically perform a database crawl just as they can for file servers, web servers, intranet servers, etc. And, as always, they have the ability to stop/pause database crawls in the same way they can with any other crawl.

Updated "Look and Feel"
As well as receiving some improvement from having its text slightly reorganized, the administrative interface of the Appliance also now employs Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for more modern HTML usage.

The Thunderstone Search Appliance is a plug-and-play device combining the simplicity of a hosted service with the security and performance of a local solution. Built on Thunderstone's advanced Texis software, the Appliance can handle more than 1,000 typical queries a minute — providing excellent value without adding administrative overhead.

a one-time, perpetual license that saves customers 40-60 percent (or more) compared to Thunderstone's closest competitor
two years of included maintenance, easily extended for additional years at affordable annual rates
superior technical support from software engineers readily accessible to customers by phone, email and message board
no restrictions on indexing third-party websites for user-empowering applications and for competitive intelligence purposes
ability to fully search targeted repositories (file servers, web servers, intranet/portal servers, database servers, application databases, etc.) and to handle files that exceed 30 MB in size
an attractive Product Investment Protection Program that makes upgrading a breeze, applying 100 percent of the initial Thunderstone product's purchase price to any desired upgrade

All Thunderstone customers with current Appliance maintenance agreements in place automatically qualify to receive the downloadable Version 7 software update.

Reporters, editors, analysts, I.T. integrators/resellers and prospective customers who would like to see the Thunderstone Search Appliance “in action” may phone Thunderstone at +1 216 820 2200, Monday - Friday, 10 a.m. - 6 p.m. Eastern Time, to arrange a free and personalized product demo. After the scheduled demo, you may also request shipment of a pre-configured Thunderstone Search Appliance that you can thoroughly evaluate in your own unique environment for up to 30 days.

About Thunderstone
As a true industry pioneer — providing some of the world's most powerful, flexible and scalable search solutions since 1981 — Thunderstone Software LLC (http://www.thunderstone.com) has developed hard-to-match expertise in creating high-performance products with tremendous value for governments, NGOs, educational institutions and businesses of all sizes.

Sales contact: Fred Harmon

+1 216 820 2200 ext.105

Media contact: Peter Thusat

+1 216 820 2200 ext.118

April 2009 Newsletter

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0400

April 2009 - Archive

HAPPENINGS

Thunderstone Software's John Turnbull (President & CEO) presented a workshop session entitled The Next Generation in Search and Best Practices Today on Friday, April 17, 2009, during the DigitalNow 2009 Conference at Disney's Yacht and Beach Club Resorts in Lake Buena Vista, Florida.

Fred Harmon (Channel Director & CSO) and Peter Thusat (Communication Director & CMO) participated March 30 - April 2, 2009 as exhibitors at the AIIM Expo + Conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

UPCOMING

Keep an eye out for our new case studies coming to this newsletter and to the Thunderstone.com website, including recent success stories on:

"Using TEXIS to Enable Native American Mixed-Language Searching on a Heritage Education Site"

"Deploying TEXIS to Rapidly Create an eCommerce Search Engine for Online Flooring Catalogs"

You may click here to find a current selection of white papers and case studies.

SOME OF TODAY'S BEST PRACTICES IN ENTERPRISE SEARCH

Understand your users.
Don't assume "good searchers."
Keep the search box simple.
Present clear results, quickly.
Get feedback from users, both by asking for it and by collecting statistics.
Build as much knowledge in as you can.
Start incrementally, test, try, and continue to improve.

If you are interested in the completed whitepaper on Best Practices in Search please contact us and we will send it to you when available. We can also arrange one on one consultation if you need some advice or assistance in improving your search capabilities.

QUOTE OF THE MONTH

"A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery."

-- from the novel Ulysses
by James Joyce (Irish writer, novelist, poet, playwright, 1882-1941)

TECH TIPS: BACKING UP YOUR SEARCH APPLIANCE SETTINGS

No computer hardware is immune to wear and tear, and the Thunderstone Search Appliances are no exception. Even though your maintenance plan will overnight you a replacement appliance for free in the event of hardware failure, a crashed hard drive would still take all your profiles with it.

Backing up your appliance's settings allows you to quickly recover your users and profiles in the event of a catastrophe. Plus, it provides you with reference data you'll find useful later to see what settings have changed over time.

To back up your Thunderstone Search Appliance settings:

After logging in, click the "Maintenance" link on the left.
Click the "Save Search Appliance settings" link.
Click the "Download" button to download the appliance's settings in XML format.

You can also choose "Restore Search Appliance settings" from the maintenance screen and provide an XML file to load the settings onto an appliance.

It's recommended you back up a copy of your settings in a secure location periodically, rather than just when they're initially set up, as small changes over time can result in big headaches when trying to re-create them all at once.

Feedback, suggestions and questions are welcome. Send your email to

March 2009 Newsletter

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0400

March 2009 - Archive

CUSTOMER QUOTE OF THE MONTH

"We use the Thunderstone Search Appliance to crawl, index and search Word files, PDFs and other content in our law firm's internal document management system. The Appliance gives us a lot of customization options in the way it operates, with excellent control over precisely what we want to make searchable and what we don't want included. It does everything we need it to do. You can just plug it in and forget about it. It works great. After years of trouble-free performance, when we finally did have a hardware failure — Thunderstone had us quickly up and running again on the same day we received our replacement unit. Their level of customer support is almost unheard of in the I.T. industry."

Michael E. Salopek
I.T. Manager
Janik, Dorman & Winter, L.L.P.
http://www.janiklaw.com

TECH TIPS: CONTROLLING YOUR CRAWL WITH WEBINATOR OR THUNDERSTONE SEARCH APPLIANCES — EXCLUDE BY FIELD

Last time we discussed exclusions and requirements for managing what pages your crawler gets, but there's one setting that gets a Tech Tips all to its own: Exclude by Field. It gives you extra power in how you're excluding and what exactly is being excluded.

"Metamorph query" matching
Rather than a prefix or substring match, Exclude by Field uses a "Metamorph query", which is the full-text matching engine used for our normal searches. You can simply type in words to match, or if you begin with a slash (/) then it is treated as a REX expression (our RegEx-like pattern matching language; see the "REX" section in the Vortex documentation on our website for more details).
Multiple fields for exclusion
All previously discussed exclusion & requirement options operate only on the URL itself. Exclude by Field allows you to exclude based on a number of different other areas:
- HTML — Matches against the raw HTML of the page. Useful if there's something in an HTML comment that you'd like to base the match on.
- Text — The formatted text of the URL. This is the same text you'd see if you looked at the list/edit info of a page or at the "Match Info" in the search results. Useful if you what to match text but want to ignore any HTML markup that may or may not be present.
- All Meta — The contents of all available meta fields are put together and then matched against.
- Meta Field -> — Matches against the contents of a specific meta field, which you specify in the next column "From Meta Field".
- Keywords, Description, & Mime Type — Matches against the text of these common meta fields.
- URL — Matches against the URL, just like Exclusion REX. You may want to use this to get the extra Exclude options, listed below.

What to exclude
Beyond more power in specifying what to match, Exclude by Field also gives you more control with what to do when you get a match.
- Pages and Links — This acts like any other exclusion rule. The page and its links are kept completely out of the walk data.
- Pages only — The content of the page is not included in the walk, but the links from the page ARE followed.
- Links only — The page is included in the walk, but the links from the page are not followed.

A word on efficiency
A disadvantage that Exclude by Field has when using any Field except URL is the page must be fully fetched before the rule can be applied.

With all other exclusion rules (and Exclude by Field on URL), the URL can be thrown out before the page is fetched an processed.

When performing Exclude by Field on the content of the page, though, the page must be downloaded and fully processed before we can know if it has HTML or a Body that matches the rules specified.

When possible, it's better to use other exclusion rules or the URL target for Exclude by Field, as this will allow you to prune URLs before they are fetched. Still, there are many things that Exclude by Field can do that the other settings simply can't (as mentioned below).
Example — Excluding directories from a file crawl
A perfect example of Exclude by Field is directories when performing a file crawl — we can't fully exclude directories because they are what link to all the files, and without them we'd have nothing. Still, we might want them not to show up in the search. We can get this with Exclude by Field.
- Metamorph Query "//=>>=" (without the quotes) — This is a REX expression for "match anything that ends in a slash". Please see the REX section of the Vortex documentation if you'd like more details on REX syntax.
- Field - URL
- Exclude - Pages only — This will keep the contents of the directory "pages" out of the crawl but will still follow the links to get the actual files and use them in the search.

If you have any questions about how to use Exclude by Field, please feel free to contact Thunderstone Support — and we'll discuss it.

HAPPENINGS

The February 2009 issue of CRN, a publication of Everything Channel and ChannelWeb.com, recognized the "top Channel Chiefs in the industry based upon their record of business innovation and dedication to the partner community." This annual list, which CRN calls "Our definitive guide to the movers and shakers of I.T. channel management," included Frederick A. Harmon (Thunderstone's Channel Director & CSO.)

You can visit the CRN website (http://www.crn.com/crn/chiefs/2009cc.jhtml?chief=136) to view pertinent information about Fred Harmon in the 2009 Channel Chiefs list.

UPCOMING

Thunderstone's John Turnbull (President and CEO) will present a workshop session entitled The Next Generation in Search: Today's Best Practices on Friday, April 17, 2009, (2:00 p.m. - 3:30 p.m.) during the DigitalNow 2009 Conference at Disney's Yacht and Beach Club Resorts in Lake Buena Vista, Florida.

Session Description
Search has progressed from a complex tool used by librarians through simple tools that let users perform a keyword search, to today's information access tools that can still provide users a simple interface but make use of much of an association's collective knowledge. In this workshop participants will learn what sorts of information can be behind a search engine and how to make it more valuable to users. The session includes a case study from IEEE, the world's largest technical membership association that significantly improved their business by focusing on their customers and helping them access content in new ways.

DigitalNow (http://www.fusionproductions.com/digitalnow/) is an annual conference that brings together senior-level executives and volunteer leaders from some of the most influential professional and trade associations in America. Produced by Fusion Productions and Disney Institute, two of the foremost authorities in adult educational design, with input from registered attendees and a conference advisory board, DigitalNow addresses the critical issues facing association leaders in the digital age.

GET YOUR FREE FLOOR PASS (A $75 VALUE) TO THE MARCH 30 - APRIL 2, 2009 AIIM INTERNATIONAL EXPOSITION + CONFERENCE IN PHILADELPHIA

The AIIM International Exposition + Conference, the yearly gathering for information management professionals across industries and lines of business, will take place Monday, March 30, through Thursday, April 2, 2009, at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia, PA. With 19 tracks, more than 135 conference sessions featuring more than 100 real-world case studies, and an Expo floor showcasing 200+ information management technology solution providers, the event aims to provide attendees with actionable insight they can use.

REGISTER TODAY FOR YOUR FREE EXPO FLOOR PASS
and get access to all keynotes, general sessions,
Expo floor education and the co-located ON DEMAND Expo!

To receive your free pass, use Registration Code: 615M
when you register at WWW.AIIMEXPO.COM
or call +1 888 824 3004.

Your FREE pass comes to you compliments of Thunderstone Software. Please stop by and visit Fred Harmon (Channel Director & CSO) and Peter Thusat (Communication Director & CMO) at Booth 1045.

January 2009 Newsletter

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0500

January 2009 - Archive

IMPROVING EFFICIENCY IN THE NEW YEAR

Was one of you New Year's resolutions to improve the efficiency of your I.T. infrastructure? Our expert engineering staff is available to clients with a current maintenance contract, and for the next month you can schedule a free 15-minute consultation on a first come first served basis to discuss your architecture and get immediate advice on improving your solution. If you need more time, that can also be arranged. There are a limited number of time slots available. So, make sure to call today at +1 216 820 2200.

TECH TIPS: THE MANY WAYS OF SPECIFYING URLS FOR THE CRAWL WITH WEBINATOR OR YOUR SEARCH APPLIANCE

There are a number of ways to specify what URLs you'd like the software to crawl, and which will be easiest to use can depend on your situation.

Base URL
The old standby -- URLs listed in the Base URL will be crawled, and the entirety of all pages they link to will be included. If you only have one or two sites and start from the top, this is definitely the way to go.

URL URL
Sometimes you may have dozens or hundreds of base URLs, maybe for doing many different folders on a site (but not all of them). If putting them all in a text box is starting to feel unwieldy, you can use the URL URL instead.

Create a text file somewhere on your website that contains the URLs you want to use as Base URLs, each on its own line. Then you can specify the URL to _that_ in the URL URL setting. The URL URL is fetched by the crawler, and every URL is treated as a Base URL. This can make it easier to manage a frequently-changing list of URLs.

This is the only benefit of URL URL. The pages will still be crawled EXACTLY as if they were all listed as Base URLs. It exists only to make the list easier to manage for you.

Single Page
Sometimes you have a single page, or a handful of pages, where you just want that page crawled, but none of its links. This is exactly what Single Page is for.

The URLs listed in Single Page are fetched, and their links are ignored.

Page URL
Just as "URL URL" is a list of URLs for "Base URL", "Page URL" is a list of URLs for "Single Page". URLs listed here should point to a plain text file on your server, each URL on its own line. Every one of those pages is fetched, and their links are completely ignored.

QUOTE OF THE MONTH

"I should take a moment to let you know how much we appreciate the Webinator product. For us, it's very fast, easy to configure and meets all our needs. Thanks for such a great product!"

David Arbuthnot
VP IT
MS Society of Canada
http://www.mssociety.ca

August 2008 Newsletter

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Thunderstone Search Appliances for Searching a Government Surplus-Property Auction Website

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400

When the U.S. General Services Administration looked to upgrade the searching capabilities on its GSA Auctions® website, it could have written a host-based search engine to run on the mainframe system. Instead, GSA opted to use "off-the-shelf" Thunderstone Search Appliances — enabling the implementation of an affordable search solution that reduces system load while providing sophisticated search features expected by today's savvy users.

The GSA Auctions® website (http://www.gsaauctions.gov) empowers people in the general public to bid electronically on excess and/or surplus Federal assets. It supports fully web-enabled auctions that permit registered participants to bid on a single item or multiple items (lots) within specified timeframes.

Auctioned items can include run-of-the-mill office equipment and furniture, as well as more exotic Federal assets such as scientific equipment, heavy machinery, airplanes, vessels, vehicles, etc. The website enables GSA to auction-off and dispose of a widely geographically dispersed inventory of products. Participants can bid on and purchase available assets, without worrying about the actual physical location of any particular item or buyer.

Interested individuals may browse products offered on the auction site, or they can choose to search for items and place bids. With flexible and robust search capabilities powered by the Thunderstone Search Appliance, GSA Auctions® takes advantage of Thunderstone's proven technological expertise in the simultaneous searching of both structured and unstructured data.

Prior to implementing Thunderstone's Appliance-based search solution, things shaped up very differently on the website — in terms of its data access and retrieval functionality. Back-ended by a COBOL application utilizing a cgi interface to the mainframe's web server, the site originally supported a basic full-text search that required parsing the complete database to search each active item.

It seemed appropriate to consider deploying new technology, because the GSA Auctions® site deserved a more feature-rich and less resource-intensive search tool.

Driving TCO Lower by Integrating Mainframe Systems with "Off-The-Shelf" Products

Thomas Schaefer serves as Systems Architect and consultant to the General Services Administration. He helps the GSA identify innovative ways to derive optimal value from its Unisys ClearPath Mainframe investment and to maximize the productive use of all related I.T. resources.

According to Schaefer, GSA could have written a host-based search engine to run on the system. But, they figured, "Why reinvent the wheel?" Instead, GSA rapidly deployed several off-the-shelf Thunderstone Search Appliances to affordably implement a state-of-the-art search solution with reduced load on the ClearPath system for each request.

"By using Thunderstone Search Appliances, GSA Auctions® has gained the rich search features users have come to expect from sites like Google. The broader point is that, while there is a move to consider total cost of ownership and migrate applications to the ClearPath environment, not every problem requires developing custom mainframe software. Some problems are better solved by integrating existing components, mainframe or otherwise, into composite systems," Schaefer said.

Thunderstone's DataLoad API, which allows data to be pushed into the Appliance, gets used a lot by the people who administer the GSA Auctions® site. And they appreciate the "plug-and-play" reliability of their Thunderstone Search Appliances -- because every added server brings with it an additional production cost. Who wants to maintain yet another server? "With Thunderstone," Schaefer said, "I haven't logged-on in eight months, and everything keeps running just fine."

GSA continues to work with Thunderstone to further enhance and refine its electronic auction offerings to the public, using the Thunderstone Search Appliance model as its standard. Schaefer explained, "We like the fact that we still have the sophistication of Texis, but in an appliance."

The current search solution for the GSAAuctions.gov site includes two load-balanced Thunderstone Search Appliances (Enterprise Edition) located in a Minnesota production environment. Each Appliance runs active-active. Two additional Thunderstone Search Appliances (one Enterprise Edition and one Small Business Edition) are installed at a GSA facility in Utah, for the purpose of ongoing new application development and testing.

Kevin J. Payne, Director of System Applications at GSA, recalled, "We considered several internal and external search alternatives. Tom [Schaefer] came up with the idea of using a search appliance, which basically meant using either Google or Thunderstone."

"Thunderstone demonstrated a real willingness to make changes that we wanted and to customize their standard appliances to meet our needs. The ability to customize was a big thing. Plus, we really like the way the search engine runs," Payne added.

Customization for the GSAAuctions.gov search enhancement project enabled GSA's Thunderstone Search Appliances to add as many as 50 additional data fields (well beyond the three definable fields that come with the standard Appliance) for auction-item searches based on bid amounts and different geographic locations.

Payne said the procurement process was fast and easy. And he expects other key GSA projects to also have their search capabilities powered by Thunderstone Search Appliances in the months ahead. As an example he cited the GovSales.gov (http://www.govsales.gov) website. Part of the Federal Asset Sales Presidential e-Government (E-GOV) initiative, it will very likely implement its own Thunderstone Search Appliance by Fall 2008.

"These are systems that bring in billions of dollars a year to the U.S. government," noted Payne.

Providing Multiple Ways of Searching Structured/Unstructured Data to Find Precise Results

The GSA Auctions® site offers a variety of ways to search for desired items:

Global Search
The upper right corner of every page on the GSA Auctions® website contains a global search box that can search the entire site for all assets available to bid on and purchase. Users may refine displayed global search results by entering another search term in the search box above their search results and then clicking the "Search Within Results" button.

Category Search
The home page has a category search box for searching only user-selected categories of items. Directly above the category list, the category search box begins with "All Categories" as the default selection from the "category dropdown" list. This list changes to reflect items available for selection as users browse the different product categories.

State Search
Choosing a state from the Browse States dropdown box on the site's main menu header will produce a list of items located in the chosen state and will allow a user to enter keywords for searching the full-text information associated with all the displayed items.

Advanced Search
Accessible via a hyperlink under the global search box, advanced search allows users to: Delimit keyword search types (all words, any words, exact match.) Specify a current winning bid range. Search within a state for an item.

The professionals who work at GSA sometimes tend to write in government-spec language that typical users do not use themselves. For instance, what GSA refers to as "vehicles" on their auction site does not correspond to terms that most people use when searching for vehicles. Rather, people look for "cars," "sedans," "autos," "automobiles," "SUVs," etc.

With built-in Metamorph concept-based searching capabilities, the Thunderstone Search Appliances saved GSA hundreds of thousands of dollars in development costs, According to Payne.

May 2008 Newsletter

Sat, 31 May 2008 00:00:00 -0400

May 2008 - Archive

QUESTIONS ON SEARCH

As Web 2.0 technologies become more prevalent what does that mean for the role of search in the enterprise?

Web 2.0 technologies provide users the ability to create their own tools for organizing and finding information. While this can be a challenge for IT staff to set rules and create a framework for the applications, the ability for users to easily create applications will be used, and the challenge will be to make it easy for that content to be reused throughout the entire enterprise, rather than be stuck in an individual's application.

Enterprise search will evolve to allow more interesting queries using more data from the organization, and be able to consume data from and produce results in more formats to be used throughout the organization, and in individual applications users create. For example a user may create an RSS feed that publishes documents containing statistics about cancer, that another user combines with other feeds to aid their research.

One of the key challenges is that it can be more difficult to index the content in a Web 2.0 application, as AJAX and other technologies mean a single URL can house the entire application, and there is no good URL to visit for a search result. That requires care in designing the application to allow a search to work against Web 2.0 content.

To get your questions on search answered please email .

Thunderstone Search Appliance Version 6.3 Released

With New SOAP API and Single Sign-On Authentication Helper for Windows Environments

Thunderstone Software LLC has released Version 6.3 of the Thunderstone Search Appliance. The newest Appliance software enhancements improve the flexibility and ease of use of the Appliance in enterprise systems.

The updates apply to both the Thunderstone Search Appliance and the Thunderstone Parametric Search Appliance, include:

DataLoad SOAP API
Search SOAP API
Single Sign-On Authentication Helper for Windows Active Directory environments whether using password, smart card, or other authentication mechanism.

The SOAP API allows users to more easily access the Appliance programatically for the purpose of loading data and searching. It should integrate easily into any development environment that supports SOAP.

The DataLoad SOAP API can be used to create custom connectors to push data from content repositories into the search appliance.

The Search SOAP API allows developers to bring results into their applications to show or manipulate how they want.

The Single Sign-On Authentication Helper lets the Appliance make use of ActiveDirectory based authentication schemes for results authorization, hiding results a user is not allowed to see completely from view.

If you have configured your Thunderstone Search Appliance to update automatically you should already have these available on your appliance, otherwise you can update the appliance manually to get these features.

If you have any questions about how these work please contact our support staff at or +1 216 820 2200.

Quote of the Month

"Thunderstone's approach is somewhat unique in basing its technology on a (SQL-compliant) relational database and full-text searches (allowing advanced pattern matching more traditional indexes find hard to cope with). This, and its relative speed, may be an advantage when using Texis as a search foundation to build applications on."

The Enterprise Search Report 2008
CMS Watch

Tech Tips: SYSUTIL and VXINFO

If you are writing a script that may need to run on multiple platforms then the <sysutil> and <vxinfo> functions can be useful for making your scripts more portable.

<sysutil> provides operating system independent ways of working with files, so the same code will work on Windows and Unix variants.

The <vxinfo> call lets you find out about the Vortex environment you are running in, which database is currently being used, where the software was installed, and which version of Texis is being used amongst others.

Used together these can improve the portability of your scripts and avoid headaches if they need to run elsewhere.

Feedback, suggestions and questions are welcome to

Thunderstone Software Announces Version 6.3 of the Thunderstone Search Appliance

Tue, 27 May 2008 00:00:00 -0400

With New SOAP API and Single Sign-On Authentication Helper for Windows Environments

CLEVELAND, OH - May 27, 2008 - Thunderstone Software LLC (http://www.thunderstone.com), a long-time industry R&D leader in providing extremely robust search solutions for businesses, NGOs, governments and educational institutions, today announced that it has released Version 6.3 of the Thunderstone Search Appliance.

The newest Appliance software enhancements, which apply to both the Thunderstone Search Appliance and the Thunderstone Parametric Search Appliance, include:

DataLoad SOAP API
Search SOAP API
Single Sign-On Authentication Helper for Windows environments (e.g. ActiveDirectory/SmartCard)

The Single Sign-On Authentication Helper lets the Appliance make use of ActiveDirectory based authentication schemes for results authorization.

The Thunderstone Search Appliance is a plug-and-play device combining the simplicity of a hosted service with the security and performance of a local solution. Built on Thunderstone's advanced Texis software, the Appliance can handle more than 1,000 typical queries a minute -- providing excellent value without adding administrative overhead.

About Thunderstone
Thunderstone Software LLC (http://www.thunderstone.com) pioneered simultaneous searching of both structured and unstructured data with the Texis relational database optimized for full-text search. Since 1981 Thunderstone has continued to develop its global reputation as provider of the world's most powerful, scalable and flexible enterprise search solutions.

Sales contact: Fred Harmon

+1 216 820 2200 ext.105

Media contact: Peter Thusat

+1 216 820 2200 ext.118

New Connectors Added for Thunderstone Search Appliances

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Push Updated Data Into Appliances, Enable Real-Time Searching

CLEVELAND, OH - April 21, 2008 - Thunderstone Software LLC (http://www.thunderstone.com), a long-time industry R&D leader in providing extremely robust search solutions for businesses, NGOs, governments and educational institutions, has announced the availability of new Thunderstone Search Appliance Connectors.

Developed in partnership with Persistent Systems (http://www.persistentsys.com/con_ptp.html,) the Connectors make it easy for Thunderstone's Search Appliance customers to create search-based applications across a broad array of enterprise content.

Connectors are now available for the following repositories:

Microsoft SharePoint 2003, 2007
EMC Documentum Content Server
EMC Documentum eRoom
IBM Lotus Notes/Domino 5.x, 6.x, 7.x
IBM Websphere Portal 6.0 WCM
IBM Websphere Portal 6.0 DM
BEA Weblogic Portal 10.0
Hummingbird Document Manager 5.1
SAP KM Portal
Interwoven WorkSite

The Thunderstone Search Appliance provides a “plug-and-play” search solution that can handle more than 1,000 queries per minute. It delivers tremendous value without adding costly administrative overhead. Whether configured as the Small Business Edition or the Enterprise Edition, a Thunderstone Search Appliance offers an attractive choice of perpetual licensing options and underlying functionality simply unmatched by any competitor in the marketplace.

About Persistent Systems
Persistent Systems (http://www.persistentsys.com/,) is a leader in Outsourced Product Development (OPD) and product integration services. Over 17 years Persistent has established an impeccable delivery track record with more than 170 global software companies. Persistent's Enterprise Content Search-enabling (ECSC) framework enables Enterprise Search, eDiscovery and other Enterprise 2.0 content collaboration tools to integrate with a variety of Enterprise Content Systems.

Sales contact: Fred Harmon

+1 216 820 2200 ext.105

Media contact: Peter Thusat

+1 216 820 2200 ext.118

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GET YOUR FREE FLOOR PASS (A $75 VALUE) TO THE MARCH 30 - APRIL 2, 2009 AIIM INTERNATIONAL EXPOSITION + CONFERENCE IN PHILADELPHIA

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