xml-dev - Re: XML Search Engine

[Tyler Baker <tyler@infinet.com>]

Fernando Cabral wrote:

> Tim Bray wrote:
>
> > 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 has had its moment of glory. The same can not be saidabout the others.
> Nevertheless, you've forgotten a very
> important name: Dataware Technologies (http://www.dataware.com).
>
> Dataware grew from 0 to several million dollars in a few years
> selling text-retrieval systems for CDs (about $40MB/year). Then
> it bought BRS, with more than 2,000 data centers.
>
> BRS is still the leading product in text retrieval on a variety
> of platforms. Just to mention libraries alone, there are more
> than 200 big, big libraries using BRS.
>
> About two years ago Dataware launched EPMS, now renamed
> Dataware II Publisher. This is a version of BRS entirely based
> on SGML (it reads from about 300 different formats, converts
> and stores as an SGML file, and allows you to do text retrieval
> both in the traditional way as well as in a more SGML-like way.
>
> Of course, it can read and index directly SGML, XML and HTML.
>
> > 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...
> >
>
> Talking about money, it is quite clear that IBM made a lotof money selling
> STAIRS. Now it is musty but for more
> than 20 years it reigned undisputed undisputed in the mainframe
> kingdom.
>
> So, I think the right conclusion is that in the low-end line of products
> where quality/functionality is disputable and price is very low
> (PC DOCs, Verity...) there is no real money. On the other hand,
> vendors aiming the high-end market should not complain.
>
> > If you're doing relational search, most relational vendors (Oracle,
> > Informix, etc) have some sort of full-text add-on that usually
> > works OK.
>
> Own experience is that relational vendors are complete uncapableof providing a
> good solution for text retrieval. The products
> are usually very poor on the funcionality side and miserable on
> the performance side.
>
> In fact, I'd like to hear from any of you that know any SIGNIFICANT
> application using any relational database for text-retrieval. By significant
> I mean: a) several giga or even terabytes of text; b) several millions of
> documents; c) at least a few dozens of concurrent users; d) need of
> complex searchs (say 20 or 30 words/parts of words combined
> with 4 or 5 different operators); d) response time bellow one second
> in a common UNIX or mainframe platform.
>
> If any of you have ever heard about such an application, I am eager
> to hear about it.

I have heard that CONText from Oracle was pretty good.  I am not sure about its
performance though, but Oracle used to make a huge deal about this "cartridge" a
while back.

Tyler


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