Thunderstone Blog: Customized Search Engine & Search Software

Thunderstone Releases Version 27

Fri, 13 Oct 2023 00:00:00 -0400

New search features include

Additional Login Form Flows: Multi step login forms are now supported by our Primer URL settings where there may be several steps required to login to the site, and the forms on intermediate pages may have dynamic or session specific information.
Improved Test Fetch Information: Test Fetch now provides additional information about the Primer URLs used, and response received to assist with setting up complicated login flows.
Metasearch Sorting: Meta search profiles now support sorting on two fields, which is commonly used by Parametric searches.
Other fixes: Miscellaneous other bug fixes and enhancements to the crawl and search interfaces.

Availability

Search Appliance Version 27 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 27 is available to all Webinator customers who have a current maintenance plan by contacting Thunderstone.

For 40 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 25

Mon, 28 Nov 2022 00:00:00 -0500

New search features include

Keep/Ignore Selectors: Keep/Ignore Selectors are specified with a restricted CSS Selector syntax. The default is nav, header, footer. Previous Keep HTML settings are migrated to Ignore Selectors. This provides more flexibility in some cases than the Keep/Ignore HTML Strings (previously called Keep/Ignore Tags) setting.
RDFa/Mircodata Support: RDFa (meta property) and Microdata (meta itemprop) values are now available after fetching a document for use in Data From Field.
Best Bets API: Best Bets are now supported in the Dataload API, and are replicated along with other setttings.
Other fixes: Miscellaneous other bug fixes and enhancements to the crawl and search interfaces.

Availability

Search Appliance Version 25 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 25 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.

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.

Thunderstone Releases Version 18

Thu, 23 Feb 2017 00:00:00 -0500

New features include

Meta search profile biasing: In a meta (federated) search each profile can be given a weight for additional control over the output to favor certain backend profiles.
Canonical URL support: The crawler will now respect link rel="canonical" headers to index the canonical form of the URL.

Improvements

HTTPS/SSL Cipher support: More flexibility in specifying supported ciphers to let you balance security and older browser support.
Reject Rules always honored: Reject rules will now always be honored, so pages will be removed from the index on a refresh if they rules now exclude them, and robots.txt rules that block the base URL will still be kept.
Faceted search counts: Faceted search counts improved when estimated due to large number of results.
Other fixes: Miscellaneous other bug fixes and enhancements to the crawl and search interfaces.

Availability

Search Appliance Version 18 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 18 is available to all Webinator customers who have a current maintenance plan by contacting Thunderstone.

For 35 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 17

Thu, 14 Jul 2016 00:00:00 -0400

New search features include

Drop in search interface: It is now easier to add a search interface to a website by embedding some simple HTML code into a web page. Using Javascript and AJAX the search interface and result pages are created without needing to create several custom pages and actions on your website.
link: syntax: Search users can now use the link: syntax to find pages that link to a specific page.
Unprimer URLs: If the crawler needs to logout from a website or take another actions at the end of the crawl an unprimer URL can be specified that behaves similar to the primer URL for logging in at the start of a crawl.
Other fixes: Miscellaneous other bug fixes and enhancements to the crawl and search interfaces.

Availability

Search Appliance Version 17 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 17 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.

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.

The Benefits of Thunderstone's Investment Protection Program

Tue, 15 Dec 2015 00:00:00 -0500

Nobody wants a bad investment. You paid good money for a service, and you don't want to be trapped by a bad decision. Thunderstone helps you unlock the information within your organization while helping you protect the investment you made in a search solution.

The Benefits of Thunderstone's Investment Protection Program

When you work with Thunderstone, you get treated fairly. There's no sudden realization that you need to upgrade to a new version to get what you really wanted. You won't feel forced to comply with unreasonable demands because you don't control a key component of your business.

No, you'll get full ownership of your Thunderstone search solution, meaning you're in charge and won't have to be afraid of being overcharged in the future.

Search Solutions That Grow With Your Organization

With Thunderstone, your company won't be penalized for success. If you are a current client, you won't be charged full price when you need to move up to an upgraded search solution. Instead, you'll only pay the difference between your current search capacity and the level of your new search solution.

Searching for the Right Solution

An investment in Thunderstone is one that allows your search solution to grow with you. Contact us online or give us a call at 216-820-2200 today to talk to one of our experts about a search solution for your organization.

February 2011 Newsletter

Mon, 28 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0500

February 2011 - Archive

TEXIS VERSION 6 RELEASED

The newest version of Texis, Version 6, is now in full release. New features include:

More intuitive searches, including Unicode support and accent insensitive searches.
Improved XML/XSLT support, including a new API for building XML based applications more easily.
HTTP/1.1 support including gzip compression to reduce crawl times and bandwidth utilization.
Enhanced options for showing search results, including multiple snippets and highlighting using CSS styles.
Many more... See a full list of Version 6 features here.

Call us today at 216-820-2200 to find out how the latest version of Texis can help you.

NEW PRODUCT SURVEY

Thunderstone Software is currently working on a new web-based email product. We'd like to hear about what you might be looking for in an email solution, from search to archiving to contact management and beyond. Please take a minute to fill out our brief survey and share your thoughts. Thanks!

TECH TIP: MULTICOLOR QUERY HIGHLIGHTING

One of the many new features of Texis 6 is styling matches when generating an abstract. Each term in the query can be highlighted in a different style (color, font, etc).

Search results for Historic airport

... On average, the airport will see one Xtra Airways flight per day. References Historic Wendover Airfield FAA Airport Master Record for ENV (Form 5010 PDF) External links Resources ...

This can be especially helpful when using a thesaurus or equivs, as it will help users realize which search terms the hits came from.

Search results for location destination

A large portion of the airport's commercial airline service occurs during the winter and spring months, as the area is a popular tourist destination and seasonal home for snowbirds ...

Highlighting can be done differently with 3 <fmt> flags:

%mI - generates CSS code in an inlinestyle attribute at every hit. The highlighting will then not be depend on any external resources.
- <fmt "%mIH" $query $text> gives:
 ... average, the airport will see ...
%mC - places unique cssclasses on each search hit. This allows you to apply your own customization by defining the class yourself.
- <fmt "%mCH" $query $text> gives:
 ... average, the airport will see ...
%mb - the previously existing method that bolds the matches is still supported.
- <fmt "%mbH" $query $text> gives:
 ... average, the airport will see ...

You can also highlight the query with itself to provide a legend of the highlighting styles as the "search results for" above: <fmt "%mIH" $query $query>

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

Thunderstone Releases Texis Version 6

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0500

CLEVELAND, OH — The leading development environment for full-text database search applications just got even better -- Texis Version 6 is here.

New features available in Texis 6 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".
Improved XML/XSLT support, including a new API for building XML based applications more easily.
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.
Enhanced options for showing search results, including multiple snippets and styled highlighting:
Shows more query-relevant text in results, and allows full customization of query term presentation.
And much more: see the full list of new features here.

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

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

Frederick A. Harmon, CSO of Thunderstone Software, Recognized as a 2010 Channel Chief by Everything Channel's CRN

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Honored for Empowering Thunderstone Channel Partners to Systematically Establish Enterprise Search Profit Centers

CLEVELAND, OH — Thunderstone Software LLC, the R & D leader that pioneered simultaneous searching of both structured and unstructured data with Thunderstone's TEXIS relational database optimized for full-text search, today announced its Channel Director & CSO Frederick A. Harmon has been named a 2010 Channel Chief by the Everything Channel's CRN. Channel Chiefs are leaders in creating effective channel programs for solution providers. They consistently defend, promote and execute effective channel partner programs and strategies.

Mr. Harmon, in collaboration with other members of Thunderstone Software's executive leadership team, has recently and successfully implemented several noteworthy enhancements to the growing Thunderstone Reseller/Channel Partner Program.

Thunderstone developed a Thunderstone Reseller/Channel Partner Portal where you can automatically register targeted sales opportunities and gain immediate access to relevant account information, current SPIF details, Thunderstone-generated marketing tools, product spec sheets personalized with your own company logo/phone number, and more.
Thunderstone began offering practical, fast-track training of qualified Thunderstone-Certified Professionals (both sales and technical staff) for Channel Partners who want to build Enterprise Search Practices and Enterprise Search Profit Centers.

Thunderstone has always delivered free and personalized online demos tailored to the customer's particular needs, plus 30-day eval units shipped pre-configured to the unique requirements of each customer. For Channel Partners with one or more employees who become Thunderstone-Certified Professionals – Thunderstone now offers FREE virtual versions of Thunderstone search solutions that certified personnel can use themselves to provide demos and evaluations for their own customers and prospects. All Thunderstone products come with a one-time, perpetual license which often saves customers 40 percent or more on their initial purchase. Thunderstone customers also enjoy an Investment Protection Program that makes upgrading their search solutions easy, desirable and affordable.

According to Harmon, "We have everything you need to succeed in the enterprise search marketplace. Our online portal has deal registration and lots of useful sales resources. We've created attractive incentives such as SPIFs up to $3,000 on sales of Thunderstone Search Appliances. We make available to Resellers an automated Thunderstone product quote tool you can use on your websites and in your sales-related emails. We provide superior tech support by phone, email and message board. For Channel Partners who choose to have some of your employees trained as Thunderstone-Certified Professionals – we offer FREE virtual versions of Thunderstone Search Appliances, as well as increased product discounts, joint promotional opportunities and the potential to receive market development funds depending on quarterly sales volume."

For the eighth consecutive year the Channel Chiefs were chosen by Everything Channel editorial based on criteria including: policy and program innovations made during the past year, the amount of revenue their company generates through partners, their willingness to speak out publicly on behalf of the channel, and the number of years they have dedicated to channel activities.

"Being named a Channel Chief is one of the most prestigious honors in the I.T. industry. This year's Channel Chiefs list offers tremendous insight into the who's who of the Channel," said Kelley Damore, Vice President and Editorial Director at Everything Channel. She continued, "Top channel executives consistently ensure that the Channel's voice is heard when strategic decisions are being made and continually nurture mutually profitable relationships. We applaud the 2010 Channel Chiefs for their successful partner programs and strategies."

Click here to see additional details about Frederick A. Harmon and the Thunderstone Reseller/Channel Partner Program published by CRN in its February 22, 2010 issue.

About Everything Channel
Everything Channel (http://www.everythingchannel.com), headquartered in Framingham, MA, is a technology marketing and sales solutions company. Through its "Complete Technology Channel Solution," Everything Channel offers the right business tools to accelerate technology sales. From branding and recruiting to marketing and sales, Everything Channel offers technology marketers the unmatched breadth and depth of global brands and market intelligence combined with unparalleled audience loyalty and credibility serving all technology sales channels through an extensive database. Everything Channel provides innovative field sales and marketing solutions to the sellers of technology to achieve measurable and significant results.

About United Business Media Limited
UBM (UBM.L) focuses on two principal activities: worldwide information distribution, targeting and monitoring; and, the development and monetisation of B2B communities and markets. UBM's businesses inform markets and serve professional commercial communities – from doctors to game developers, from journalists to jewelry traders, from farmers to pharmacists – with integrated events, online, print and business information products. Our 6,500 staff in more than 30 countries are organised into specialist teams that serve these communities, bringing buyers and sellers together, helping them to do business and their markets to work effectively and efficiently. For more information, go to http://www.ubm.com.

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.

Thunderstone has a comprehensive, deep and broad range of enterprise search products that include:

Thunderstone's TEXIS RDBMS optimized for full-text search
The Webinator web indexing and retrieval software
Thunderstone Parametric Search Appliances
Thunderstone Search Appliances
Texis Catalog Solutions (Thunderstone's eCommerce search engines)
Virtual Versions of Thunderstone Search Appliances
Virtual Versions of Thunderstone Parametric Search Appliances
Thunderstone Data Services (SaaS; Hosted Search Solutions with licenses to both TEXIS and the Webinator)

Sales contact: Frederick A. Harmon

+1 216 820 2200 ext.105

Media contact: Peter Thusat

+1 216 820 2200 ext.118

December 2009 Newsletter

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0500

December 2009 - Archive

MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY NEW YEAR

Thundersone Software wishes everyone a most joyful holiday, and we would like to extend our special gratitude to the many long-time and new customers who have kept our Thunderstone Professional Services staff very busy this year with your enterprise search-related development, consulting and training projects. We highly value our ever-growing number of productive and friendly working relationships, and we sincerely look forward to more opportunities to serve you in 2010 and beyond.

MARZIPAN RECIPE

This recipe could be used as part of a 12-course meal known in Polish as Wigilia, or on its own. Wigilia is eaten after sundown on Christmas Eve.

Makes 2 lbs

Ingredients

1 lb blanched almonds, finely ground
1 lb powdered sugar (confectioner's sugar)
2 Tbsp orange water or rose water (Can be obtained from your local drugstore)
food colouring and decorations

Method

Combine ground almonds, sugar and flavouring in a saucepan. Cook until mixture leaves side of pan.
Roll almond mixture on a flat surface to a 1/2 -inch thickness. Cut into shapes, mold, paint with food colouring, decorate, etc.
Place on wax paper to dry for 2 hours.

Difficulty: easy.

Time: 1/2 hour plus time to decorate.

Precision: Approximate measurement OK.

Looking for more Christmas recipes? See http://www.thunderstone.com/texis/site/demos/recipe/search.html.

QUOTE OF THE MONTH

"I just wanted to drop you a quick note to thank you for helping us successfuly implement our 2009 Sleigh-Ready Process Improvement Initiative here at the North Pole. As you know, speed and accuracy have always presented unique challenges in creating and twice-checking Santa's official Naughty & Nice List. This year everything went off smoothly and without a hitch, now that we've deployed the Thunderstone Texis Catalog Solution. Your eCommerce Search Engine easily handled all our important search parameters, including rapidly-changing information from that formerly troublesome Coal-Lump-Recipient Database. Thanks again for your awesome, customer-centric approach to helping us make the season bright."

Lead Knowledge Architect
& Personal Assistant to the Chief Elf
Distribution Center at Santa's Workshop

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

October 2009 Newsletter

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0400

October 2009 - Archive

HAPPY HALLOWEEN from Thunderstone Software!

"Halloween.
Sly does it. Tiptoe catspaws. Slide and creep.
But why? What for? How? Who? When! Where did it all begin?
'You don't know, do you?' asks Carapace Clavicle Moundshroud climbing out
under the pile of leaves under the Halloween Tree. 'You don't really know!'."

Ray Bradbury,The Halloween Tree

NEW OPENSEARCH FORMAT RESULTS IN THUNDERSTONE SEARCH APPLIANCES

All Thunderstone appliances are now capable of producing results in the OpenSearch format. This standardized format makes it even easier for other products to integrate with our Thunderstone Search Appliance.

The most apparent effect of this is the ability to add your profiles to the "quick search" box to the right of the address bar in your web browser, such as Internet Explorer or Firefox. Once you have performed a search, the drop-down next to the quick search box will allow you to "add" that profile's search to the list of selectable search engines.

Please see the "OpenSearch Support" documentation on your appliance for more information, or feel free to contact Thunderstone Support if you have any questions.

CUSTOMER QUOTE OF THE MONTH

"Improving search results and removing outdated Intranet content was just the tip of our iceberg. We plan on migrating our Intranet media content, document content and information/news delivery to separate server platforms. Once the new systems are operational we will create separate Profiles on the Thunderstone SBE Appliance and continue providing a single search point for our associates. I am certain we will rely on assistance from Thunderstone Support during these future transitions."

Britt Bullock
Web Developer
Arvest Bank

UPCOMING EVENT

Strongsville Rotary Biz Expo
November 10, 2009
4:30 p.m. - 7 p.m.
Walter F. Ehrnfelt Recreation & Senior Center
18100 Royalton Road
Strongsville, Ohio 44136

John Turnbull (CEO) and Peter Thusat (CMO) plan to represent Thunderstone Software as exhibitors at this free Northeast Ohio event sponsored by the Rotary Club of Strongsville. The Expo will feature 50 booths of local companies, as well as light food and beverages. The sponsors request that attendees bring non-perishable food items suitable for donation to the Strongsville Food Bank.

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

September 2009 Newsletter

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0400

September 2009 - Archive

NEW RSS SUPPORT IN THUNDERSTONE SEARCH APPLIANCES

With our software R & D team's release of texisScripts 7.0.3, the Thunderstone Search Appliance now supports both consuming and producing RSS feeds.

RSS feeds in crawled web pages will now have their links extracted and properly followed. This includes feeds that are normal hyperlinks and feeds that are embedded as the feed for that page.

In addition, all searches now have an embedded RSS feed for that search query. This can allow you to monitor certain queries to see when the results are added or updated. Just bring up the results that you'd like to monitor, and your browser's RSS icon will light up, indicating you can follow the feed for it. Please see the Appliance documentation under "Search Result RSS Feeds" for more details.

In next month's newsletter we'll discuss the OpenSearch support that was also recently added.

QUOTE OF THE MONTH

"Sorrow and scarlet leaf,
Sad thoughts and sunny weather.
Ah me, this glory and this grief
Agree not well together!"

A Song For September
Thomas William Parsons, 1819 - 1892

HAPPENINGS

KMWORLD SELECTS THUNDERSTONE SEARCH APPLIANCE AS A "TREND-SETTING PRODUCT" FOR 2009

KMWorld, a publishing unit of Information Today, Inc., has included the Thunderstone Search Appliance on its 2009 Trend Setting Products list. 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.

KMWorld featured the list in its printed September 2009 edition, as well as online at the KMWorld.com site.

UPCOMING SEARCH PROJECTS FOR YOU?

We know it still looks like summer outside. However, if your plans for 2009 include any projects that could benefit from the assistance of our Professional Services team here at Thunderstone Software – you should contact us soon to make sure we can accommodate your desired requirements and timelines.

We've got a pretty good load of development and implementation projects underway at the moment. So, please call +1 216 820 2200 if you would like to schedule any programming/consulting/training, etc. for this autumn or winter. Let's discuss your needs now, before time runs out, because we really do want to help you succeed.

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

August 2009 Newsletter

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0400

August 2009 - Archive

HAPPENINGS

LATEST SEARCH APPLIANCES FEATURED IN KMWORLD

A front-page article by ArnoldIT.com's Stephen E. Arnold highlights the newest versions of the Thunderstone Search Appliance and the Google Search Appliance in the printed July/August edition of KMWorld, a publication of Information Today, Inc.

The author says Thunderstone's high-performance, flexible appliances give administrators and developers excellent control over the system – with strong document-level security, feature-rich tuning controls and ability to schedule, stop, pause or configure database crawls in the same way as they can for file servers, Web servers, intranet servers, etc.

You can read the KMWorld article, entitled "Making room for appliances," online here.

THUNDERSTONE ADDS A RESELLER IN AUSTRALIA

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

(For Search Appliances and Webinator)
Tredale
1300 737 078
http://www.tredale.com.au

UPCOMING EVENTS

Development work continues on 2009 Thunderstone Software releases of:

TEXIS (Version 6)
Webinator (Version 6)
Thunderstone's Texis Catalog (eCommerce search engine for online catalogs)

CUSTOMER QUOTE OF THE MONTH

"What we have in this particular case is a Native American user group thesaurus language. It's been developed, and it can be added to. The more that it's used – and you put that feedback loop back into this thesaurus – the smarter it becomes. And it starts to create, with this new millennium, a written mind that parallels the thesaurus user group's community. This is something that TEXIS is equipped to deal with that the other stuff out there is not equipped to deal with. It's part of its strength."

Kathy Pincus
Chief Technology Officer
Mnemotrix Systems, Inc.
http://www.NativeAmericanInstitute.org

TECH TIP: DIRECTING YOUR CRAWLER WITH YOUR CONTENT – USING ROBOTS.TXT AND META-ROBOTS

Robots.txt refers to a way for a website to indicate to crawlers what parts of the site it would like the crawler to stay out of. This is not specific to Thunderstone software, and it applies to other web crawlers too. There are two ways of accomplishing this:

With a "robots.txt" file at the root of the webserver, such as http://www.thunderstone.com/robots.txt. This can be used by site maintainers to tell crawlers to stay out of entire sections. For details of the syntax, please see http://www.robotstxt.org/.

Within an individual HTML page as a custom header, such as <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">. This allows page authors to control the indexing of the content and following of links of an individual page, without affecting others around it.

Note that these are guidelines – they do not create technical restrictions that prevent a crawler from descending into a directory or following links, and they should not be used for security purposes.

All Thunderstone products obey robots.txt and meta robots by default. Sometimes you need to index content you don't control that has a robots exclusion on it. If you'd like to ignore the robots reccomendations and index the content, there are Walk Settings that allow this:

Robots.txt (Y or N) – whether or not to obey the /robots.txt on a site (if it exists). Defaults to Y.

Meta Robots (Y or N) – whether or not to obey any meta robot headers found within an individual page. Defaults to Y.

Robots Placeholder (Y or N) – When a page is excluded from the crawl via robots, this affects whether a "placeholder" record is kept in the crawl data. The placeholder keeps the page from being visited unnecessarily, but it can cause the page to show up in searches where the URL is being searched (by being included in Index Fields.) Defaults to Y.

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

June 2009 Newsletter

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0400

June 2009 - Archive

HAPPENINGS

THUNDERSTONE ADDS MORE RESELLERS.
We welcome the following organizations to our growing Thunderstone Channel Partner Program:

(For Texis, Search Appliances and Webinator in the U.S.A. and Canada)
Alliance Technology Group, LLC
+1 410 712 0270
http://www.alliance-it.com

CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY: THUNDERSTONE'S TEXIS POWERS NATIVE AMERICAN MIXED-LANGUAGE SEARCHING ON A HERITAGE EDUCATION SITE

The Challenge:

How do you create an online learning resource with search capabilities that satisfy the special requirements of students, teachers and tribal leaders in today's Native American communities?

Kids on the reservations often speak in a manner that combines their traditional native language and English. They want a website that allows them to search for desired information in the same way.

Educators need innovative, practical tools that can help students to learn more about their native languages, history and culture. They must teach nearly forgotten subjects and transmit cherished values.

People with the responsibilities of leadership in Native American tribes have a dislike for anything that threatens their unique heritage. They fight against the corrosive influences of rampant commercialism.

The Solution:

The Native American Cultural and Historical Institute (NAI) and Mnemotrix Systems, Inc. created a Heritage Education online database with sophisticated User Group features and Concept Search capabilities powered by Thunderstone's TEXIS.

Users of the Intelligent Archive Search tool at NativeAmericanInstitute.org can enter 'mix-and-match' queries that combine English with words from the Seminole, Miccosukee, Creek, Muskogee, Cherokee, Apache, Lakota, Sioux, Yurok and other Native American languages.

The customizable thesaurus in TEXIS takes advantage of vocabularies developed by Native American speakers working closely with the tribal communities. As more people use this search application's thesaurus and continue to add to it, it becomes increasingly smarter.

TEXIS allows NAI to index only targeted content into a fully searchable database optimized for rapidly accessing and retrieving both structured data and unstructured information. TEXIS will enable online users to very quickly find text documents, maps, images, audio recordings, photographs and related educational materials with a high degree of relevance to authentic Native American knowledge, achievements, beliefs and perspectives.

Tendencies within public school systems on the reservations often end up taking Native American kids away from who they are, forcing students to choose between educational attainment and their tribal community roots. In response, the Native American Cultural and Historical Institute (NAI) developed NativeAmericanInstitute.org — a Heritage Education teaching resource for tribal educators, students and researchers. This web-based database provides access to an expanding quantity of archived information via Thunderstone's TEXIS search technology.

Click here to read more online.

Click here for a PDF of the NAI case study.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Development work continues on 2009 Thunderstone Software releases of TEXIS (Version 6,) Webinator (Version 6) and the new Texis Catalog product (eCommerce search engine for online catalogs.)

Looking ahead, you can also expect additional enhancements to the recently-released Version 7 software for Thunderstone Search Appliances and Thunderstone Parametric Search Appliances.

CUSTOMER QUOTE OF THE MONTH

"You guys are fantastic. I can't think of any vendor that's been as responsive and accommodating. I really appreciate it!"

Gene Quinn
Web Services Manager
State of Georgia Department of Corrections
http://www.dcor.state.ga.us/

TECH TIPS: USING THE DISK SPACE VIEWER ON YOUR THUNDERSTONE APPLIANCE

Disk space is rarely an issue on Thunderstone Search Appliances, due to the fact that the Appliance only stores the plaintext representation of content (so, a 5Mb PDF might only contain 10k of plaintext.) Still, it can be nice to keep tabs on space.

The Search Appliance can tell you how much disk space is used/free and exactly how much each individual profile is using.

After logging in, click the "Maintenance" link on the left.
Click the "Display Disk Space" link at the top.

The top section lists the free space, available space and total space for your Appliance.

The bottom section lists the size of each profile, sorted by disk space (largest profiles by on the top.) Clicking on the "Profile" column header will sort by profile instead.

If you click on a profile's path, it will show the sizes of the individual files for that profile. This can be helpful when troubleshooting with Support if a profile seems to be taking up more space than it should.

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

Thunderstone Software's John Turnbull to Present April 17 Workshop for Association Leaders at DigitalNow 2009 Conference

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0400

LAKE BUENA VISTA, FL — John Turnbull, President & CEO of Thunderstone Software LLC, will present a workshop session entitled "The Next Generation in Search: Today's Best Practices" on Friday, April 17, 2009, from 2 p.m. to 3:30 p.m., during the DigitalNow 2009 Conference at Disney's Yacht and Beach Club Resorts in Lake Buena Vista, Florida.

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.

Session Description:

Search, as a function, has progressed from a complex tool that only librarians or information specialists could use to an everyman's tool that millions of people can use to find information on just about anything. Participants in this workshop will have an opportunity for direct dialog with John Turnbull, President & CEO of Thunderstone Software LLC. They can learn about what sort of information can be behind a search engine and how to make it more valuable to users. Barbara H. Lange, Staff Director of Product Management and Business Development for IEEE, Inc., will join Mr. Turnbull during the session to provide a case study.

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

Thunderstone Software's Frederick A. Harmon Named as 2009 Channel Chief by Everything Channel's CRN Magazine

Sun, 01 Mar 2009 09:37:59 -0500

Search Pioneer's Top Sales Executive Honored for Successful Launch of New Thunderstone Reseller/Channel Partner Program

CLEVELAND, OH — Thunderstone Software LLC, the R & D leader that pioneered simultaneous searching of both structured and unstructured data with its TEXIS relational database optimized for full-text search, today announced that Frederick A. Harmon, Thunderstone's Channel Director & CSO, has been named a 2009 Channel Chief by Everything Channel's Computer Reseller News (CRN) magazine. This annual listing recognizes influential I.T. channel executives who defend, promote and execute effective channel partner programs and strategies.

According to Robert C. DeMarzo, SVP/Editorial Director of Everything Channel, "Effective channel executives consistently ensure that the Channel's voice is heard when strategic decisions are being made and continually nurture mutually profitable relationships. This year's Channel Chiefs are strong channel advocates, and we applaud them for their successful partner programs and strategies."

Frederick A. Harmon joined Thunderstone Software as Channel Director & CSO in January 2008. He worked closely with CEO John Turnbull and CMO Peter Thusat to plan, develop and launch a new Thunderstone Reseller/Channel Partner Program that already has five Resellers in North America (with 40+ locations) and four Resellers/Channel Partners in Europe.

"Thunderstone has many proven competitive advantages for efficiently bringing a wide range of enterprise search solutions to large, medium-sized and small businesses — as well as to government entities, NGOs and educational institutions," said Harmon.

He continued, "In addition to Thunderstone Search Appliances, we also provide highly customizable search software products and hard-to-find services in the areas of search analysis and design, prototyping, application development, training, application optimization and application hosting — on either dedicated servers or on virtual servers in our data center.

"And we don't force our sales partners to become enterprise search experts. Unless you choose to have some of your employees trained as Thunderstone-Certified Representatives, you can simply rely on Thunderstone to handle all the product demos, the evaluation process and technical support of your customers."

"Resellers want a sound, practical approach to realistic revenue growth with an experienced enterprise search partner who makes things as easy as possible for them. They prefer a Reseller Program that doesn't impose any fees, minimum volume requirements or sales quotas. They insist on world-class tech support delivered by real engineers who actually solve problems."

"We get it. And it shows."

Resellers/Channel Partners can easily profit from an amazing product that will 'wow' their customers, while Thunderstone provides:

Account protection with quick email/fax registration of targeted sales opportunities
Free and personalized online product demos tailored to each customer's particular needs, using the customer's own data and matching the customer's desired "look and feel"
30-day eval units shipped to customers and pre-configured to their requirements
Superior tech support by phone, email and message board
One-time, perpetual licenses offering 40-60% upfront savings and even more dramatic year-to-year savings for customers
Product Investment Protection that makes upgrading easy, desirable and affordable
28+ years of real-world success as a search industry pioneer, which means Thunderstone understands better than most what works and what doesn't
Discounts for Resellers/Channel Partners and exciting SPIF programs available for salespeople

Harmon concluded, "Top industry analysts expect annual enterprise search sales to exceed $1.1 billion in 2009. We've made it easy for Resellers, Integrators and Solution Providers to profitably collaborate with Thunderstone to capitalize on this rapidly growing enterprise search market."

Thunderstone's enterprise search products include:

Thunderstone's TEXIS
TEXIS, the innovative development platform behind Thunderstone's entire line of enterprise search products, is the only fully-integrated SQL RDBMS that intelligently queries and manages databases containing natural language text, standard data types, geographic information, images, video, audio and other payload data. Texis powers many diverse, real-time and integrated applications such as message profiling & handling, image library management, help-desk support, online news retrieval, business intelligence, research libraries, litigation support and eCommerce search engines for online catalogs.

The Thunderstone Parametric Search Appliance
The Parametric Search Appliance delivers the flexibility and power of TEXIS plus the ease of use of an appliance. It provides an easy way to create applications that combine full-text and structured data without programming. The Thunderstone Parametric Search Appliance enables standard SQL data retrieval and full-text keyword searches combined with a user-selected filter on up to 50 data fields.

The Webinator
The Webinator is a sophisticated Web indexing and retrieval package that allows Website administrators to create and customize a high-quality retrieval interface to collections of web documents no matter where they reside. The Webinator serves as an example of the type of applications that can be built around Thunderstone's Texis RDBMS and Web Script (Vortex.)

The Thunderstone Search Appliance
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. The Appliance can handle more than 1,000 typical queries a minute — providing excellent value without adding administrative overhead. It delivers an easy-to-use feature set that especially appeals to the mission-focused requirements of non-technical executives and staff.

About Everything Channel
Everything Channel (http://www.everythingchannel.com) is the one-stop shop for accessing, enabling, managing and accelerating technology sales channels. From branding and recruiting to marketing and sales, Everything Channel offers technology marketers the unmatched breadth and depth of global brands and market intelligence combined with unparalleled audience loyalty and credibility serving all technology sales channels through an extensive database. Everything Channel provides innovative sales and marketing solutions to arm the sellers of technology with the resources they need to achieve measurable and significant results.

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 list of 2009 CRN Channel Chiefs.

Sales contact: Fred Harmon

+1 216 820 2200 ext.105

Media contact: Peter Thusat

+1 216 820 2200 ext.118

December 2008 Newsletter

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0500

December 2008 - Archive

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from Thunderstone Software LLC

TECH TIPS: HOW TO USE THE "RESULTS RANKING" OPTIONS IN YOUR WEBINATOR OR SEARCH APPLIANCE

Results Ranking Options

Thunderstone uses an internal algorithm for determining how "good" a search hit is, but this algorithm is very customizable in both Webinator and the Thunderstone Search Appliances. On the "Search Settings" page, towards the bottom, are several options that will assist you with adjusting the ranking algorithm:

Word Ordering -- Controls how important word order is for results ranking: hits with terms in the same order as the query are considered better. For example, if searching for "bear arms", then the hit "arm bears", while matching both terms, is probably not as good as an in-order match. The default weight is Medium (500).

Word Proximity -- Controls how important proximity of terms is for results ranking. The closer the hit's terms are grouped together, the better the rank. The default weight is Medium (500).

Database Frequency -- Controls how important frequency in the table is for results ranking. The more a term occurs in the table being searched, the worse its rank. Terms that occur in many documents are usually less relevant than rare terms. For example, in a web-walk database the word "HTML" is likely to occur in most documents: it thus has little use in finding a specific document. The default weight is Medium (500).

Document Frequency -- Controls how important frequency in document is for results ranking. The more occurrences of a term in a document, the better its rank, up to a point. The default weight is Medium (500).

Position in Text -- Controls how important closeness to document start is for results ranking. Hits closer to the top of the document are considered better. The default weight is Medium (500).

Clicks from Home -- Controls how important being close to a Base URL is. The more times the walk had to click on links to get to the page, the lower weight it will have. The default weight is off.

QUOTE OF THE MONTH

"What I really like about Webinator, still, is the fact that it's relatively easy to configure. It's much easier to configure than it was back when we bought the original product, when everything was run through command lines. I like the notion of relevance in terms of returned hits. It seems to make a lot more sense to me than, for example, Google page ranking - which places a much higher priority on popularity than it does on the actual content of the pages where text matches. Another thing that has been nice is the fact there is support for synonym matching within the server. And I think Vortex as a scripting language is very powerful. Even though I haven't used it to its fullest ability, it's proven to be quite flexible when we've needed to make modifications."

Mark J. Weixel
Director of Informatics
University Center for International Studies (UCIS)
University of Pittsburgh

THOUGHT FOR THE SEASON

"A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas"
(commonly known as A Christmas Carol -- with illustrations by John Leech)

When Charles Dickens self-published what he referred to as his "little Christmas Book" on December 19, 1843, he found himself in debt -- and he desperately needed to raise money.

He wrote the novella over a six-week period in October and November. Consistent with the musical form (after all, he did call it a carol,) Dickens presented the work in five staves -- rather than chapters.

In one week after having it printed, he successfully sold every copy of the first run -- more than 6,000 books. The work's instant popularity (eight stage adaptations went into production within two months of its inital publication) has continued to this day.

The circumstances of Bob Cratchit at work in Scrooge's counting-house and at home with his poor -- but loving -- family (including Tiny Tim,) bring to mind timely thoughts of social justice and transformative generosity that deserve to remain with us throughout the holiday season and, hopefully, well beyond it.

You can find an online version of the classic book at A Christmas Story by Charles Dickens.

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

November 2008 Newsletter

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0500

November 2008 - Archive

Happy Thanksgiving from Thunderstone Software LLC

TECH TIPS: HOW TO USE THE "CUSTOM THESAURUS" FEATURE ON YOUR THUNDERSTONE SEARCH APPLIANCE

The Thunderstone Search Appliance has a built-in thesaurus, but your industry may have terms specific to it that don't occur in a normal thesaurus. The custom thesaurus allows you to make arbitrary equivalences, making one search term automatically equivalent to others.

This is also handy if something gets renamed, and, when users search for the old name, you want to show results as if they had also searched for the new name.

1. Write the custom thesaurus.

You'll need to use a plain text editor, such as wordpad, to create the equivalence file -- with lines like the following format:

car,ford,chevy,toyota
groceries,food,shopping

Each line is a separate set of equivalences.

The details of what these equivalances mean depend on the "Permutations" setting when you upload, as discussed below.

Save this text file somewhere you'll keep it permanently. Once it's uploaded to the Appliance, it's digested into a binary format. So, you won't be able to retrieve the original list later.

2. Upload the custom thesaurus.

Choose "Maintenance" on the left menu.
Choose "Custom Thesaurus" from the "Search Appliance Settings" section.
Type the name you'd like to use for the thesaurus (which is only used internally), choose a permutation, and then click "Browse" to locate the file you saved earlier.
The "Permutations" setting affects how exactly the words are equivalent to each other:
- None -- Just the terms as you entered them. Query "car" would find "car", "ford", "chevy" and "toyota". Query "ford" would only find "ford".
- Single -- The terms you entered and the reverse. Same as above plus a query for any of "ford", "chevy" or "toyota" would also find "car".
- Full -- Equate every term with every other in each entry. Same as above plus a query for "ford" would also find "chevy" and "toyota".
Click "Save Changes" to upload the file.

If you want to change the thesaurus later, you can re-upload the new file to the same thesasurus.

3. Set the profile to use the thesaurus.

Choose "All Walk Settings" on the left.
Set "Secondary Thesaurus" to the one you created.
Check "Apply Appearance" to apply it to the live settings.

This allows you to still use the default thesaurus and your own custom thesaurus simultaneously. You can also use the same thesaurus for multiple profiles, by setting all of the profiles to use it.

QUOTE OF THE MONTH

"We needed search capabilities, and there were a lot of different types of ways to do that. The Thunderstone box was the least expensive, most powerful search solution we found. More recently we've been building our online subscription service to supplement the print products with a large amount of information that's not published in books, that's just available electronically. And we're, little by little, putting that on the web, because -- obviously -- it's all going to end up there anyway eventually. Then, somebody at Thunderstone said: 'I tell you what; we'll host it on a virtual server.' And for me, right now, I can't even tell the difference between whether it's on a box or on the hosted service. It's got the same control panel. I open it up, it works great, and I don't have to worry about it."

Timothy Gall
Publisher
The Lincoln Library Press

HAPPENINGS

Tom Schaefer, President of Better Software Solutions, Inc.(http://bettersoftwaresolutions.blogspot.com/) will participate as a presenter at the Gilbane Boston Conference (http://gilbaneboston.com) on Wednesday, December 3, 2008, from 2:00 p.m. - 3:30 p.m. during a session entitled EST-1: Plug-and Play: "Enterprise Experiences with Search Appliances". Mr. Schaefer will share how he assisted the U.S. General Services Administration in efficiently deploying Thunderstone Search Appliances to enable parametric searching on a government surplus-property auction website.

Peter Thusat, Communication Director at Thunderstone Software, recently conducted our annual teleconference briefing with Adriaan M. Bloem, Contributing Analyst for CMSWatch.com (http://www.cmswatch.com). Mr. Bloem also serves as founder of the Netherlands-based content management strategy consultancy called Radagio (http://www.radagio.com).

Thunderstone welcomes the following organizations to our Reseller/Channel Partner Program:

(for new customers in Europe)
Texis, Custom Applications of Texis and Search Appliances
MatchMinds BV
Wiersedreef 5-7
3433 ZX Nieuwegein
The Netherlands
+31 (0) 6 141 772 70
http://www.matchminds.nl

(for new customers in Romania)
Search Appliances and Webinator
Pragma Computers SRL
http://pragma.ro

(for new customers in the United States and Canada)
Search Appliances and Webinator
Softchoice Corporation
+1 800 268 7638
http://www.softchoice.com

We continue to add new customer success stories to our growing list of case studies on the Thunderstone website at http://www.thunderstone.com/texis/site/pages/Exposition.html.

If you would like to share your own story about how your organization has deployed Thunderstone search technology, please call Peter Thusat at +1 216 820 2200 ext. 118.

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

September 2008 Newsletter

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0400

September 2008 - Archive

TECH TIPS: HOW TO USE THE "BEST BETS" FEATURE ON YOUR THUNDERSTONE SEARCH APPLIANCE OR WEBINATOR

Best Bets allow you to create "adword"-style results, where you create an arbitrary keyword-url association. When people search for that keyword, that URL will appear above the results in a special display at the top of the page, regardless of any matching or ranking algorithms.

Thunderstone has made getting started with Best Bets easier than ever. If your Webinator or Appliance software is up to date, you can skip Steps 1 and 3 below.

Try bringing up the list/edit page that Step 2 describes. If it lists the Best Bet Group as "(Create New)" then you only need to do Step 2 (it will automatically create a group and set it to display). If it says "Select", you'll need to either update your software or perform Steps 1, 2 and 3.

1. Create a Best Bet group.

Choose "Best Bet Groups" on the left menu.
Choose a name for your group (such as "myGroup"), choose how you'd like it to display, and hit "Save".

2. Add keyword-url associations.

Choose "List/Edit URLs" on the left menu. (or "Profile Tools->List/Edit URLs" with the latest script updates)
Enter a pattern to list, or just hit "Submit" to list all.
Click on the URL to create keywords for.
In the "Best Bet Words" section, enter the Title, Keywords, and Description you want. Also choose the proper group if there are multiple, and hit "Save".

3. Set that Best Bet group to display.

Choose "Search Settings" on the left.
Change the "Top Best Bet Group" setting to "myGroup" (or whatever you chose as the name for your Best Bet group).
Check "Apply Appearance" if you'd like it to apply to the live site.
Hit "Update".

The Best Bet should now show on your searches when the keyword is searched for. You can create more keyword-url associations within the same group by repeating the steps above.

QUOTE OF THE MONTH

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

Kevin J. Payne
Director of System Applications
U.S. Government Services Administration (GSA)

HAPPENINGS

DM Radio Hosts Eric Kavanagh and Jim Ericson spoke at length with Thunderstone CEO John Turnbull, Forrester Analyst Leslie Owens and Progress EasyAsk General Manager Dr. Larry Harris during an August 21, 2008 online program entitled In Search of... Enterprise Search. You can hear John Turnbull's interview segment and his comments in the roundtable discussion at http://www.dmreview.com/dmradio/10001790-1.html.

On September 3, 2008 Thunderstone Software LLC presented a free webinar on "3 Powerful Advantages That SQL Brings To Structured And Unstructured Search." If you would like to receive a copy of the slides and notes from that webinar, just send your request by email to call Peter Thusat at +1 216 820 2200 ext. 118.

CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY: THUNDERSTONE DATA SERVICES FOR SEARCHING A WEB-BASED RESOURCE TO HELP STUDENTS WITH HOMEWORK

Editors at Lincoln Library Press, Inc. created an online version of everything contained in the multi-volume hardback books their publishing company sells to school libraries. This new and popular web-based resource for students, called FactCite, would also offer much additional content not currently available within the printed editions. The creators of FactCite required powerful search technology that could handle the growing information access and retrieval needs of the FactCite.com website. After considering Google and a couple of other potential options, they started with a Thunderstone Search Appliance -- but they ultimately decided it made the most sense to have Thunderstone Data Services host their search solution.

FactCite: The Lincoln Library Online provides more than 20,000 pages of eye-catching, thought-provoking and intelligently presented factual information that includes many useful elements designed specifically to help students in grades 4 - 12 with their homework assignments.

The online articles, bios, photos, illustrations, etc., include 700+ reader-inspiring profiles of the world's greatest athletes (from all eight editions of the 14-volume set entitled The Lincoln Library of Sports Champions,) the complete five-volume contents of The Lincoln Library of Greek & Roman Mythology, as well as the entire seven-volume set of The Lincoln Library Shapers of Society and The United States Encyclopedia of History -- an impressive (but, alas, no longer in print) work which The Lincoln Library Press bought, took over, updated, computerized and put online exclusively at FactCite.

Located in Cleveland, Ohio, The Lincoln Library Press (http://www.thelincolnlibrary.com) markets its large, colorful books and the FactCite online resource directly to school librarians throughout the United States. Schools that own at least one of the printed and bound sets (Sports Champions, 8th Edition; Greek & Roman Mythology; or Shapers of Society) can obtain unlimited access to FactCite for an annual license fee of $179 per building. Schools that don't own any of the print editions may provide unlimited FactCite access to their students by paying an annual license fee of $495 per building.

The Lincoln Library Press is an imprint of Lincoln Library Press, Inc., which Timothy and Susan Gall have owned and operated since 1992. This husband-wife team already possessed more than 20 years of hands-on experience as reference work developers by the time that their company's editorial offices assumed stewardship of all The Lincoln Library publications in 1998. They first met each other while employed at Northeast Ohio-based ASM International, the Materials Information Society. Timothy, an attorney, worked there as an acquisition editor. He also developed a product called Metal Selector, an online database of alloys and materials, to assist engineers in selecting materials for design purposes. Susan, a teacher by training who additionally earned an MBA, worked at ASM International on the educational end of things -- developing technical courses and producing learning programs in video and print formats.

Putting All Their Best-Available Content on the Web, and Making it Searchable

As the forward-looking owners of all The Lincoln Library publications decided to update, expand, digitize and put their proprietary intellectual property on the web and to offer it to schools as FactCite -- they required search technology that could handle the growing data access and retrieval needs of the FactCite.com website.

Tim Gall, publisher at The Lincoln Library Press, recalled, "We needed search capabilities, and there were a lot of different types of ways to do that..." Read More...
Download the FactCite case study PDF here.

Thunderstone Data Services provides Internet presence for demanding Web applications. All Data Services sites come with multi-megabit connectivity and include usage licenses to both Texis and Webinator. For more information call Fred Harmon at +1 216 820 2200 ext. 105.

If you would like to share your own story about how your organization has deployed Thunderstone search technology, please call Peter Thusat at +1 216 820 2200 ext. 118.

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

Customer Success Story: Thunderstone Data Services For Searching A Web-based Resource To Help Students With Homework

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Located in Cleveland, Ohio, The Lincoln Library Press markets its large, colorful books and the FactCite online resource directly to school librarians throughout the United States. Schools that own at least one of the printed and bound sets (Sports Champions, 8th Edition; Greek & Roman Mythology; or Shapers of Society) can obtain unlimited access to FactCite for an annual license fee of $179 per building. Schools that don't own any of the print editions may provide unlimited FactCite access to their students by paying an annual license fee of $495 per building.

Putting All Their Best-Available Content on the Web, and Making it Searchable

Tim Gall, publisher at The Lincoln Library Press, recalled, "We needed search capabilities, and there were a lot of different types of ways to do that. The Thunderstone box was the least expensive, most powerful search solution we found. We looked at Google and a couple of others.

"But there were also some challenges for a small company like us. If you got the Thunderstone Search Appliance box, you physically had to host it here -- which we didn't necessarily want to do, because that means you need a little bit more internal infrastructure. You have to manage your servers. You have to make sure they're up and running. You can try to send it out to other hosted server providers, but that's easier said than done. They say things like, 'You'd have to have your own cabinet. You'd have to hire your own administrator, and on and on.'

"We were working with a web hosting provider that cost us a lot of money because they didn't know how to interface with the search box. They told us we needed a new server. They said Thunderstone wasn't following some protocol. They started talking gobbledygook. And they were wrong. They just didn't spend the time to understand how to get things right. So, they had egg on their face.

"We bought the box. It was here in our office. It doesn't really need much configuration. When we got it, I hired a guy who was a little smarter than me. I think he had that search box up and running inside half an hour. We set it up and just forgot about it. It ran perfectly, right away.

"More recently we've been building our online subscription service to supplement the print products with a large amount of information that's not published in books, that's just available electronically. And we're, little by little, putting that on the web, because -- obviously -- it's all going to end up there anyway eventually. Then, somebody at Thunderstone said: 'I tell you what; we'll host it on a virtual server.' And for me, right now, I can't even tell the difference between whether it's on a box or on the hosted service. It's got the same control panel. I open it up, it works great, and I don't have to worry about it."

Tapping Thunderstone Data Services For Consulting And Hosted Search

The Thunderstone Search Appliance is a plug-and-play device that represents the best search solution for many businesses, NGOs, educational institutions and government agencies around the world. It comes with a one-time, perpetual license and powerful features usually found in much more expensive products.

Some organizations, however, prefer a remotely-hosted, outsourced search solution that requires no additional hardware/software on their premises. Or they may need custom programming not suitable for the built-out Appliance environment.

With Thunderstone Data Services, including monthly hosting and any applicable project consulting or programming work, customers can get precisely what they want -- while enjoying a surprisingly affordable total cost of ownership on their Thunderstone-hosted search solution.

For the sake of maintaining the proprietary nature of the FactCite online subscription service, it would prove critical to develop appropriate security measures. Thunderstone created a Texis-based search application with access control capabilities that fully accommodated the desired user login procedures specified by The Lincoln Library Press.

Gall related, "I was flabbergasted that it hadn't been canned by hardly anyone. You can't find this type of login software very easily out there. I mean, I looked all over. I wanted a simple program -- just a little database to keep track of users, give them a password, etc. I figured, how hard can that be? Someone's canned that. I had quotes from tens of thousands of dollars and up. Or, in many cases, they couldn't even do it at all.

"Thunderstone quickly and easily wrote that customized login capability for us. It's gone very smoothly, and we found it pleasant working with them. No complaints.

"Maybe a school will have eight or ten different computers, and they don't want to have to bother with a separate password and login for each one. It's too much to manage. So, we can use the same password, etc. for computers within a specified IP range. We also give the librarians a user name and password that the kids can use to log in after school hours -- when they're at home."

Combining the Advantages of Printed Books with Online Enhancements

Educational book reviewers have favorably noted that while The Lincoln Library's multi-volume sets are easy to read and grasp for younger students just beginning to learn about the people and topics covered, the well-researched articles also manage to offer much subject matter that eleventh or twelfth graders will find informative and descriptive enough to help them when they write their term papers.

FactCite: The Lincoln Library Online retains the attractive content formatting and the many homework-friendly characteristics that make The Lincoln Library editions popular with students. Users can access everything, complete with all full-color and black-and-white scanned elements, plus the actual source text as it appears in the printed books. Or they can enter a query in the search box -- and it will return relevant results.

FactCite provides both educators and pupils with:

Thousands of images
Advanced search features
Drill-down menus for easy searching
Multiple indexes
Regularly-updated content

Teachers encourage students to employ FactCite when working on their homework assignments, although they typically remind the kids to properly credit the website in their reference notes and bibliographies.

"We tried to design it from the kids' point of view. Often you go to a site, you type in the keyword, and you get 5,000 hits. And Wikipedia, for example, is not really ideal for kids in school. It's too difficult to read. There's too much information there, and it's not a narrative story. It's sometimes overwhelming.

"The articles at FactCite are written specifically to be useful to our target audience. There's material you can print out for inclusion in your reports. You can print out graphics and images, even outlined images that can be colored in. You won't find excessive links (they're mostly at the end of articles) and certainly none that take you away from the site.

"The challenge is, at certain grade levels, to get kids to read. It's very hard to teach a kid to read on the computer. There are too many distractions. There are too many hot links. You're moving all over, and you lose sight of what you're doing.

"We've brought into our books [and FactCite] large-text introductions that are written at a level that almost any kid could read. And then we have lots of pictures and text boxes to spur their interest, as well as to keep them engaged.

"In terms of using Thunderstone's search technology, we're certainly just scratching the surface currently. But, we know the things we want to do with it in the future." Gall explained.

Enriching FactCite.com with The Lincoln Library of Essential Information

FactCite continues to add fresh, new articles dealing with the fundamentals of Geography, World History, Science and other key areas that will cross-cut most of the curriculum for grades 4 through 12. This growing quantity of robust and enhanced content comes from a rigorously updated version of The Lincoln Library of Essential Information.

According to Gall, the book began in 1907 as The Standard Dictionary of Facts -- a one-volume compilation of all sorts of information, and by 1924 it had turned into The Lincoln Library of Essential Information. At that time there was a big push in America for self education. People were trying to teach themselves all sorts of things. And this book was organized to serve that purpose. Instead of being organized as a standard encyclopedia, things were organized by subject categories. Therefore, students could go through and read about a subject. At the end of the articles there were test questions. Readers, in the privacy of their own homes, could test themselves on the knowledge they acquired by going through the articles.

"It evolved into a two-volume set, and by then it had kind of retreated into the library and out of the home. It still retained its autodidact features. If you wanted to learn a subject area, you could go into it and in six or seven pages you got a pretty good grasp of what it's all about. You'd see which sources to go to for further reading, books you should be looking for, what you really should be reading if you want to have some clue about what's going on. There were always incredibly good authors writing for it, people from the best universities."

"So, we took this set and we scanned it and computerized it. It had never been computerized. And we started sending out the articles for revision. Perhaps about 60 percent are back already. We're moving now to put that material online at FactCite.

"We're going to lead with it on the website first. Rather than making print the primary product and electronic the secondary product, we're now going to flip that -- with electronic as the primary and print as the secondary product," said Gall.

Gall estimated that comparable online products from marketplace competitors would probably cost schools $4,000 to $5,000. The Lincoln Library Press, even as it steadily expands its total knowledge repository in the months ahead, will deliver a much better-priced alternative. And, unlike others, FactCite won't offer 50,000 articles about the 'Internet.' Instead, it will have one or two highly useful articles that kids can and will actually read.

Are You Making Use of Only Half Your Data?

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Today's organizations have a mix of structured information such as in databases and unstructured text in documents, but most of their tools only effectively use one or the other set of data -- leaving a lot of potential value unrecognized.

Thunderstone Software LLC (http://www.thunderstone.com), a long-time industry R&D leader in providing extremely robust search solutions to organizations ranging from internet giants such as eBay and HotJobs to small NGOs and sole-proprietors, will present a FREE September 3, 2008 webinar that reveals some remarkably affordable and easy-to-implement answers to the growing problem of accessing and retrieving all your important data.

"3 Powerful Advantages That SQL Brings To Structured And Unstructured Search"

The webinar highlights three major competitive advantages of an SQL-enabled search platform, including:

The flexibility of Structured Query Language to express complex queries

A large base of developers who already know how to write SQL queries

SQL's ad-hoc nature that allows applications to meet new needs easily

For more details and information on how you can register for the FREE September 3, 2008 webinar exploring "3 Powerful Advantages That SQL Brings To Structured And Unstructured Search," email or call Peter Thusat at +1 216 820 2200.

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. Texis, the innovative development platform behind Thunderstone's entire line of enterprise search products, is the only fully-integrated SQL RDBMS that intelligently queries and manages databases containing natural language text, standard data types, geographic information, images, video, audio and other payload data. Thunderstone first released and began marketing the Texis RDBMS in 1992.

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

Thunderstone Blog: Customized Search Engine & Search Software

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Honored for Empowering Thunderstone Channel Partners to Systematically Establish Enterprise Search Profit Centers

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MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY NEW YEAR

MARZIPAN RECIPE

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THUNDERSTONE ADDS A RESELLER IN AUSTRALIA

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CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY: THUNDERSTONE'S TEXIS POWERS NATIVE AMERICAN MIXED-LANGUAGE SEARCHING ON A HERITAGE EDUCATION SITE