xml-dev - Re: XML Search Engine

[Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>]

At 07:52 PM 11/5/98 -0600, len bullard wrote:
>This is an interesting thread and relevant to my current work which 
>is unfortunatly, not in XML, but in relational implementations.  
>However, can someone direct me to any sites which provide source 
>examples of full text retrieval engines?  

Such sites will be rather small, due to a little problem in 
the retrieval business, namely nobody has ever made serious
money at it.  Five years ago, I would have said the leading
vendors were Fulcrum, Verity, PLS, Open Text, and IDI/Basis.

Fulcrum barely dodged bankruptcy and ended up being swallowed by
PC Docs, a low-end document management company.  Verity is the only
one still soldiering on, having burned through $30M in venture cap
and a large part of their IPO bucks, are actually showing some
signs of small amounts of black ink.  PLS staggered (mostly) into
the arms of AOL.  Open Text retreated from search into document
management, and bought IDI.

Lesson: there's not much juice in that business. XML might cheer
things up a bit, you never know.  There are any number of decent
free search engines you can run with either Apache or NT servers...

If you're doing relational search, most relational vendors (Oracle,
Informix, etc) have some sort of full-text add-on that usually
works OK. 

 -Tim

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