Thunderstone Blog: Customized Search Engine & Search Software

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Cleveland, Ohio, April 25, 2005 -- Thunderstone Software has announced a major step forward in the enterprise search market. It is the first search appliance vendor to offer comprehensive administrative access controls for distributed management.

The new capability extends Thunderstone's technical leadership in turn-key search solutions. The breakthrough allows departmental administrators to control their own subsets of a Thunderstone Search Appliance enterprise index.

Thunderstone's innovation is conceptually simple, but underneath is an advanced permissions management database. It enables a top-level administrator to delegate Search Appliance control privileges to any number of other managers. Each manager receives whole or partial responsibility for one or more document indexes, and has access only to those specific controls.

Security features are key to making distributed management possible. Search Appliance sub-administrators cannot interfere with other managers' indexes or settings. Controls are accessed from a secure web page.

"This is a major advance in the enterprise search space," said John Turnbull, Thunderstone general manager. "Distributed management, with its associated security, is crucial to many enterprise search situations. Thunderstone is proud to be the first search appliance vendor to offer administrative access controls."

Thunderstone's innovation solves a key problem in indexing across multiple web sites or file servers: Typically, each department administrator - not an enterprise level manager - knows which departmental content should be included in the enterprise index. Equally important, department administrators know which content should be excluded for reasons of confidentiality or security. But until now, they could not control the way an enterprise-level search appliance crawled their documents.

Using the new features, the top Thunderstone Search Appliance administrator may even give different controls to different sub-administrators. Example controls are: document file types; re-indexing schedule; category assignments; document inclusion/exclusion; and many other settings.

Separate indexes may be searched alone or combined into one or more "meta-searches." Thus there may be several different "views" of enterprise content. In a typical scenario, there are different but overlapping indexes for business partners, regular employees, and corporate management.

"And unlike other search appliance vendors, Thunderstone allows customers to index third-party information such as government or industry web sites," said Turnbull. "This policy enables enterprises to create unique targeted collections of web information for their users or for competitive intelligence."

Many other features of the Thunderstone Search Appliance are intended specifically for enterprise requirements. These include:

• Files system crawling. File servers may be indexed directly without web server software.
• Document-level security. Search results are limited to only items that each user has permission to read.
• Mirroring. Organizations may maintain an optional redundant system.
• Real-time indexing. Documents may be added to or removed from the index instantly.
• Automatic scale-up. Larger document limits may be enabled by remote software upgrade or by adding appliances as needed.

Thunderstone Search Appliances scale up to handle collections with hundreds of millions of documents. The Appliances also provide excellent value. Example acquisition cost is $15,000 for a version to index 500,000 documents.

Thunderstone Software LLC is a pioneer of search engine technology, providing text retrieval products to industry, government, and educational institutions since 1981. Thunderstone's TEXIS text-relational database technology powers the Search Appliances, or may be licensed separately. The Appliances provide a "plug and play" search solution for intra-nets and web sites; index most document formats; and can be extensively customized by non-technical managers.

For more information, visit http://www.thunderstone.com or call +1 216-820-2200. U.S. government customers may purchase Search Appliances through Thunderstone's GSA contract GS-35F-0914P.

Cleveland, Ohio, Jan. 27, 2005 -- Thunderstone Software announced a new version of its Search Appliance aimed at the small business market. The new product is called Small Business Edition (SBE) and provides a search of up to 50,000 documents or web pages.

The Search Appliance SBE is available for a total investment of only $4,995, which includes support and maintenance for two years. Its closest competitor costs $7,495 including support for two years.

Thunderstone Search Appliances provide a turn-key search solution for intranets or web sites. They index many document formats including word processing; PDF; presentations; and most anything found on the web. The Appliances can be extensively customized by means of browser menus administered by a non-technical user.

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The Appliance SBE offers many unique features not found in other search appliances, including the ability to:

• Index any third-party information from the internet;
• Perform "wildcard" searches;
• Add or remove documents from the index instantly;
• Crawl file systems directly without webserver software;
• Combine results from multiple collections ("metasearch");
• Index JavaScript and Flash content.
• Raise capacity by remote upgrade.

The Appliance SBE contains most features of Thunderstone's enterprise-level versions, which index 250,000 pages and up. This includes the innovative Adaptive Indexing process, which conserves network resources by determining automatically how often each item needs to be updated.

The SBE optionally can be upgraded to a 250,000- or 500,000-document version. In upgrading, the SBE purchase price is credited in full against the cost of the larger capacity version.

All Thunderstone Search Appliance versions allow customers to index third-party information, such as government or industry web sites. This policy enables customers to create unique targeted collections of web information for their users or for competitive intelligence.

The Thunderstone Search Appliance SBE is ordered directly through Thunderstone's web site. For more information, visit http://www.thunderstone.com or call +1 216-820-2200. For government buyers, Thunderstone's GSA contract number is GS-35F-0914P.

ABOUT THUNDERSTONE SOFTWARE

Thunderstone Software LLC is a pioneer of search engine technology, providing text retrieval products to industry, government, and educational institutions since 1981. Thunderstone's TEXIS text-oriented relational database technology powers the Search Appliance, or may be licensed separately. Applications of TEXIS include online publishing; catalogs; classified advertising; document management; text mining; categorization; intelligence, and web indexing.

Cleveland, Oct. 7, 2004 -- Government agencies have a new solution for searching their archives and internal networks. The Thunderstone Search Appliance, a cost-effective, turn-key system, is now available through the Federal Supply Service of the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA).

The Thunderstone Search Appliance is intended for organizations needing sophisticated and accurate document retrieval while maintaining the simplest possible software administration. The Appliance indexes most document formats including Microsoft Office, other word processor files, PDFs, presentations, and web sites. A business administrator can easily customize the Appliance's operation via web-based menus.

The GSA Federal Supply Service provides government buyers a pre-negotiated "best price." The Thunderstone Search Appliance is listed on the GSA Information Technology Schedule, also known as Schedule 70. Products available through Schedule 70 may be purchased by government customers "off-the-shelf." These transactions satisfy requirements of the Competition in Contracting Act and Federal Acquisition Regulation. Some state and local governments also have arrangements to purchase through GSA Schedule 70.

According to numerous studies, office workers spend large proportions of their time--as much as 30%--trying to locate information. The Thunderstone Search Appliance can dramatically reduce this figure and have a direct positive impact on an organization's ability to accomplish its mission.

The Thunderstone Search Appliance has received high marks from independent reviewers. InfoWorld Magazine's Test Center gave it an "Excellent" rating. EWeek Magazine said its search results were "uniformly excellent." EWeek also noted that the Thunderstone Search Appliance price "works out to less than half the starting price of... rival Google Search Appliance."

Thunderstone's GSA contract number is GS-35F-0914P. GSA pricing for the Search Appliance can be obtained directly from Thunderstone. For more information, call 216-820-2200 or email .

ABOUT THUNDERSTONE SOFTWARE

Thunderstone Software LLC is a pioneer of search engine technology, providing text retrieval products to industry, government, and educational institutions since 1981. Applications of Thunderstone technology include: publishing; catalogs; classified advertising; document management; text mining; categorization; and intelligence. Thunderstone's products are used on major web sites worldwide. Customers include eBay, Corbis, QVC, About.com, and Associated Press. Thunderstone's web site is http://www.thunderstone.com.

Cleveland, Ohio, June 25, 2004 -- Web and intranet managers have a new way to help users navigate their sites. The Thunderstone Search Appliance "Best Bets" feature lets administrators easily designate pages to be highlighted or forced to the top within regular search results.

Best Bets provides, in effect, a private version of the sponsored listings familiar to web search engine users. The difference is that on one's own web site, there are no placement fees! Best Bets is available now in the Search Appliance as well as in Thunderstone's Texis software.

Thunderstone developed Best Bets in response to the increasing complexity of customer intra-nets and web sites. When common searches return hundreds or more result links within your site, the pages considered best by management may differ from those ranked highest by relevance algorithms. Best Bets provides management a simple way to influence results in advance -- and to change the ranking settings at any time.

Best Bets can be used to create suggested links, or to promote specific URLs so they stand out from the main results. There is no limit to the number of pages or search phrases that may be stored. A single phrase may link to multiple pages and vice-versa.

"It's like advertising your own content on your own site," said Doran Howitt, Thunderstone Vice President, Marketing. "If you advertise on web search engines, you probably should be advertising your content within your own site search too!

The Thunderstone Search Appliance is a turn-key solution designed for easy deployment and administration on intra-nets or web sites. The Search Appliance indexes most document formats including word processor files, PDF, JavaScript and Flash.

ABOUT THUNDERSTONE

Thunderstone Software LLC is a pioneer of search engine technology, providing text retrieval products to industry, government, and educational institutions since 1981.

Thunderstone's Texis software is at the heart of the Search Appliance. Texis is the most versatile platform for search application development, uniquely integrating natural language and relevance ranking with structured SQL relational database indexing. Texis is ideal for search requirements where large result sets must be sorted by metadata values or grouped into categories.

Applications of Thunderstone technology include: publishing; catalogs; classified advertising; document management; text mining; categorization; and intelligence. Thunderstone's products are used on thousands of web sites worldwide. Major customers include eBay, Corbis, QVC, About.com, ZDNet, and HotJobs. For more information, visit http://www.thunderstone.com or call +1 216-820-2200.