Internet Search meets the Desktop
The use of a search engine has become the starting point for most users on the Internet, so much that Internet browsers have built-in access for the most popular search engines. Using a search engine has become so common that many spend hours a day looking through the search results attempting to find information on external web sites. While Internet search is extremely valuable, most organizations create a wealth of knowledge that is locked in internal documents and electronic mail that is not easily searchable. Most applications have built in search capabilities using the basic find feature, but the document must be located first and then loaded before it can be searched. Even Microsoft has found a this to be true and has attempted to solve this problem a few different times with the Microsoft Indexing Service and the much slower Windows XP Explorer Search 'dog' where simple text searches are possible.
The best attempt at solving this problem came from Google's free Desktop Search utility. Unlike Google, waiting for Microsoft's very simple search utility using the find 'files with this name' and find 'A word or phrase in the file' is like watching paint dry. At least the Google Desktop search creates an keyword database speeding up searches in a friendly Google like search result page. Although Microsoft's Indexing service does create a keyword database, this services was never well exploited like the Google Desktop search system. Read more
Search Appliances
Mostly everyone knows how to search the Internet and how to use the Edit - Find feature of their favorite applications, like Word or Outlook. Microsoft tried to make Search easier with the Windows Explorer Search feature built into the navigation toolbar featuring a friendly search dog (that even does cute tricks). It was the Google Desktop that raised the bar on Search for the normal Windows user with simple download and install by offering the unique capability of finding documents very quickly in almost any format including in email mailbox databases.
Most organizations share documents on file servers requiring a new type of service addressed by network search applications. Enter the search appliance which is a standalone, rack-mounted server dedicated to scanning, indexing and providing the search engine for an entire organization. The IT manager will no longer need to install software and tune the server performance. Google, Thunderstone and Black Tulip Systems offer this new Enterprise Search Appliance where a document can be found across the organizations intranet. Read more
Evolution of Search
The Internet revolution drove every company towards creating a web site. Yahoo! was one of the first locations where this new information age was organized. Very much like an on-line yellow pages, this was directory organized into hierarchies based on the type of organization or services offered. This was and still is a manual process of submitting a web site page into this hierarchy and hoping the manual operators would update the directory in a timely manner. Very little automation was available and many new search engine submittal services showed up to facilitate this, all at a price.
The web site crawler, or spider, arrived later. At first, these new spiders were used to determine the viability of any one HTML page by checking the resulting links and determining if they were still active. The World Wide Web is a constantly changing series of individual documents accessible one page at a time using an URL or uniform resource locator. Read more