xml-dev - Re: xml search engine?

[Walter Underwood <wunder@infoseek.com>]

At 01:00 PM 3/30/00 -0500, David Megginson wrote:
>Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com> writes:
> > I think what you're talking about would normally be called an Information-
> > Retrieval (IR) system.  Such a system is distinguished from traditional
> > search engines in the general case in that nobody has ever successfully
> > built one that, in the general case, works.
> > 
> > (putting on my asbestos underwear) -Tim
>
>I think that anyone who lived through the excitement, hope, and
>disappointment of the AI craze in the 1980's (academic) and early
>1990's (commercial) would have to be very foolish to make any
>different claim unless they could back it up with running,
>production-grade software.

Ultraseek Server is definately production-grade. We added XML
as a supported document type in September 1998. It's a modern,
high-quality IR engine, that scales to millions of documents
and millions of queries per day. And you can buy it now.

XML documents are treated like HTML documents, Microsoft Word
documents, or PDF documents. Extract the text and meta data
(helped by a DTD-specific map), and index them. All are a
searchable with a common model, but without complex XQL-like
queries.

And try the query suggested earlier on www.go.com (same basic
internal algorithms as Ultraseek Server):

  have you got anything about the causes of hyperinflation in 
    inter-war Germany?

Turns out that the first hit is a good description of the causes
of hyperinflation in inter-war Germany:

   http://william-king.www.drexel.edu/top/prin/txt/probs/infl7.html

wunder
--
Walter R. Underwood
Senior Staff Engineer
Infoseek Software
GO Network, part of The Walt Disney Company
wunder@infoseek.com
http://software.infoseek.com/cce/ (my product)
http://www.best.com/~wunder/
1-408-543-6946


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