Thunderstone Blog: Customized Search Engine & Search Software

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 .

January 2010 - Archive

CONTENTS

• New Pricing for Parametric Search Appliances
• Happenings
• Customer Quote of the Month
• Tech Tip: Search Appliance Test Page Fetcher
• Subscription/Unsubscription and Contacts

NEW PRICING FOR PARAMETRIC SEARCH APPLIANCES

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

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

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

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

HAPPENINGS

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

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

CUSTOMER QUOTE OF THE MONTH

"This search device rocks..."

 

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

TECH TIP: SEARCH APPLIANCE TEST PAGE FETCHER

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

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

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

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

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

• Resolving network names
• Pinging machines
• Performing traceroutes
• Sending test emails

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

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

Powerful, Yet Affordable Line of Search Appliances Continues to Impress

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeremy Townsend
Programmer/Internet Analyst
Perdue Farms Inc.

 

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

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

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

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

Sales contact: Frederick A. Harmon

+1 216 820 2200 ext.105

Media contact: Peter Thusat

+1 216 820 2200 ext.118