Thunderstone Blog: Customized Search Engine & Search Software

February 2011 - Archive

CONTENTS

• Texis Version 6 Released
• New Product Survey
• Tech Tip: Multicolor Query Highlighting
• Subscribe/Unsubscribe and Contacts

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

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 <span style="background:#ffff66;color:black;font-weight:bold;">airport</span> 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 <span class="query queryset2">airport</span> will see ...
• %mb - the previously existing method that bolds the matches is still supported.
  • <fmt "%mbH" $query $text> gives:
    ... average, the <b>airport</b> 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 .

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 - Archive

CONTENTS

• Public Sector Search Appliance Savings Program
• Customer Quote of the Month
• Tech Tip: New vs Refresh Walks
• Subscription/Unsubscription and Contacts

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 .

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

The Thunderstone family of search solutions provides the following benefits:

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

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

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

February 2010 - Archive

CONTENTS

• Avoiding Commmon Weaknesses
• Happenings
• Tech Tip: Crawling file servers with your Search Appliance
• Subscription/Unsubscription and Contacts

AVOIDING COMMON WEAKNESSES

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

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

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

HAPPENINGS

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

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

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

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

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

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

TECH TIP: CRAWLING FILE SERVERS WITH YOUR SEARCH APPLIANCE

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

Setup via "Network Filesystems & Shares"

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

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

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

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

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