Thunderstone Blog: Customized Search Engine & Search Software

CLEVELAND, OH -- (MARKET WIRE) -- 06/15/2004 -- Thunderstone Software announced its sale of a search system for the Hollywood.com website. Thunderstone's Webinator product will provide an up-to-date indexing of around one million movie reviews, entertainment listings, and related information appearing on the re-designed new and improved Hollywood.com web site.

Webinator is one of the original web-search software products, introduced in 1995 and now in major release 5. Webinator powers search features for many hundreds of web sites in many languages around the world.

Hollywood.com is one of the leading movie-related sites on the Internet, featuring movie reviews, showtimes listings, entertainment news, and an extensive multimedia library. Hollywood.com serves more than one billion web pages annually.

"We found Webinator the best technology for searching our content under our requirements," said Laurie S. Silvers, President of Hollywood.com. "Its many advanced features were crucial, such as its ability to reindex fast-changing subsets of the site quickly, and its ability to crawl through JavaScript links. Our site structure is somewhat complicated but Webinator handles it beautifully."

Thunderstone's general manager, John Turnbull, said: "We built many features into Webinator to optimize it for indexing large complex web sites. We're happy to see that effort put to good use on Hollywood.com."

Thunderstone's Webinator is available in a variety of configurations including a free version. For more information, see http://www.webinator.com.

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 flagship Texis software is the most versatile platform for search application development. Texis is at the heart of the Webinator and Search Appliance products. Texis uniquely integrates natural language and relevance ranking functionality with structured SQL relational database indexing. Applications of Thunderstone technologies include: online publishing, product catalogs, classified advertising, document management, text mining, web searching, 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.

Cleveland, Ohio -- June 11, 2004 -- Web and intra-net administrators have a new solution for out-of-date search indexes. Adaptive Indexing, an innovative new feature of the Thunderstone Search Appliance, keeps site and enterprise indexes fresher and more accurate than ever before.

Adaptive Indexing uses a learning algorithm to index each document or web page according to a different schedule. The software discovers automatically which items need more frequent updating. The index is updated incrementally -- as often as every minute -- so that users find what they need reliably and quickly.

"Adaptive Indexing represents a significant advance in commercial search software," said Doran Howitt, Thunderstone's Vice President of Marketing. "Other search products must crawl an entire collection or web site on a uniform schedule. That may take too much time and bandwidth to do more than once a day, or even once a week. Adaptive Indexing conserves time and bandwidth, allowing index refreshing to be performed on an ongoing basis."

The Thunderstone Search Appliance is a turn-key solution designed for easy deployment and administration on intra-nets or web sites. It indexes most document formats including word processor files, PDFs, presentations, JavaScript and Flash content. The Search Appliance can be extensively customized by means of menus controlled by a business manager.

Adaptive Indexing is available in the new version 5 of the Thunderstone Search Appliance, available immediately. For more information, visit http://www.thunderstone.com or call +1 216-820-2200.

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.

Most Americans know QVC by its shopping channel on television. QVC's web site, however, also is one of the most successful online retailers, bringing in a substantial portion of QVC's $4.4 billion of sales yearly.

Thunderstone's Texis software plays an important role at QVC in a variety of ways.

Unlike television sales, where each item is on sale for only a few minutes at a time, QVC's entire inventory is available all the time on its web site. The online database thus has hundreds of thousands of products, and requires a robust search engine to help users find the items that satisfy them.

QVC needed its search engine to do more than simply search, however. The company had many advanced requirements.

For example, its customers are price sensitive, so QVC wanted to enable them to select by price as well as by description. A user can enter "gold necklace" and "$100", and QVC's Texis system automatically finds products within +/- 25% of the user-entered price. QVC found Texis the best product for combining a numeric range query with a text search.

Texis's real-time functionality also is crucial to QVC.

We update our inventory in realtime to make sure sold-out products are not offered to the customer. This is especially important In high volume periods like 'Fashion Day' where certain colors and sizes sell out quickly and frequently. This is a key function Texis provides that no other search engine we've seen can do.
Frendy Glasser, QVC Director of Data Administration

In addition to serving search results, Texis powers the "drill-down" or catalog browsing features, which are based on product metadata. And when a user views the detailed description associated with an individual item, Texis serves up that content too.

Many other Texis features are in use. Products are ranked according to QVC's proprietary criteria. And results are retrieved from "partner" databases for products such as books, music, and sporting goods.

The Texis applications are used as well by QVC's order-entry representatives when customers call asking for a product. All in all, the Texis installation at QVC is handling millions of database queries daily. QVC runs Texis on IBM AIX hardware, with the "front end" user interface written in ASP running on Microsoft NT servers.

What's also important to us, besides the performance and advanced features, is the flexibility to change how we respond to queries as the business situation evolves. We like knowing that Texis can be programmed to respond to searches according to almost any logic we come up with. Before Texis, we had another search package that was a major product in the industry, but we were frustrated by programmability limitations, and by its proprietary interface. Texis, in additional to being a great search product, is easily customizable due to its industry-standard database features.

We also value Texis's consistency in response time regardless of volume, its scalability, and its availability. We rarely, and I mean rarely, have any downtime problems with the Thunderstone Texis engine.
Frendy Glasser, QVC Director of Data Administration

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Cleveland -- Jan. 31, 2003 -- The industry's most powerful search appliance was introduced by Thunderstone Software. The Thunderstone[TM] Search Appliance handles 10 times the load of other turn-key search solutions, serving 1,000 typical searches per minute. Competing products handle only about 100 searches per minute.

The Thunderstone Search Appliance is intended for organizations seeking the simplest possible software administration, but without giving up the security and performance of a locally hosted solution. It is a complete web-search or intranet-search solution ready to use as soon as plugged into a network. The Appliance is based on Thunderstone's renowned Texis software, which powers the search functionality of major web sites such as eBay and QVC.

Unlike products that index a limited number of collections, the Thunderstone Appliance allows customers to create as many separate indexes as needed. Thus the administrator may give different groups of users access to content that is appropriate for each group. The Appliance indexes most document formats including HTML, PDF, and word processor files.

The Thunderstone Appliance is also the only search solution that indexes JavaScript[TM] links and content. Other search products skip over JavaScript and thus miss many web pages, even entire sites. The Thunderstone Appliance also indexes FlashTM links and content.

"As the variety of web applications within organizations grows, customers are finding it difficult to manage all the data on their networks," said John Turnbull, Thunderstone General Manager. "Our Search Appliance provides a turn-key solution that won't add to their administrative burden. It performs sophisticated relevance ranking, so that users find what they need quickly and effectively."

The Thunderstone Search Appliance may be integrated into an organization's web sites by means of a simple HTML form added to any page. The appearance may be customized by adding an organization's "look and feel" template, or by using XSLT.

Thunderstone Search Appliance models are available to index either 500,000 or one million documents. For more information about the Appliance, contact Thunderstone Software at 216-820-2200.

ABOUT THUNDERSTONE

Thunderstone Software LLC is the premier provider of text mining technology, integrating unstructured searching with SQL relational database functionality. Applications of this technology include publishing, catalogs, classified advertising, auctions, content management, and web-searching. Thunderstone is a 22-year-old company whose products are used on thousands of web sites worldwide. Major customers include eBay, Corbis, QVC, About.com, ZDNet, HotJobs, and many others. For more information, visit http://www.thunderstone.com.