This page lists search engines which have one to five responses in the survey: not enough for even a rough average. However, we find the user comments on advantages and disadvantages to be fascinating and enlightening -- just be sure to check the date reported (new versions may have addressed the problems) and note how long the program was in use on that date.

See the Survey Summary page for information on other search engines and the survey methodology

Disclosure: The SearchTools.com site is provided as a free service to the web development community and is not sponsored by any advertisers. However, Search Tools Consulting has provided analysis and information to search engine devlopers including Atomz, AltaVista, Siderean, Google, Inktomi, Maxum (Phantom) and Mondosoft (MondoSearch). We do not give them site visitor or survey personal information or allow our relationships with any vendors to change any product review or analysis.

Listing of Less-Common Search Engines

Sorted by Name, Rating, How Long (length of time used), and Date Reported

SearchTool	rating	how long	date reported	What about this search tool works well?	Any problems or issues with this search tool?
Alkaline	5	6 months	07/1999	It does what I want and does not pretend to do more. It's easy to install and it's free.	-
	2	1 year	11/1999	Fast searches Handles PDF files well	Timeouts in some versions Bugs in current version Support agreement not forthcoming
	2	3 months	10/1999	-	-
AltaVista	4	2 years	09/1999	AV currently provides a broader search than SWISH-E	Am somewhat distressed that it does not recognize Dublin Core meta tags.
	2	5 years	07/2001	-	old version
	2	3 months	04/2000	indexes pdf files	-
	1	3 months	01/2000	-	we have not been able to optimize it for our site. we have multiple feeds (news, weather, entertainment) and these always surface before any real meaty relevant pages
Apple e.g.	2	3 years	03/2000	Very good stemming, intelligent searches, high quality returns	It crashes; not supported, but we can't find anything better. We're looking and all of the Mac products have problems.
	1	1 year	06/2000	serves up pages reasonably closely related to the query	crashes the machine
	1	??	01/2000	-	It takes a very long time to return any pages, and when it serves up the page, the url changes nightly, so that pages are not bookmarkable
Architext	1	4 years	05/2001	-	It can't search numbers or citations of legalese.
	1	1 year	07/2001	simple	Doesn't index numerals (we're a transit agency, with route numbers).
Architext	2	5 yrs	01/2001	Free. Relatively easy to configure.	Doesn't search the DB, so must create ugly workarounds. Doesn't support multiple languages. No support from vendor.
Autonomy	3	1 year	11/2000	-	-
beseen	4	4 months	04/2001	great customization for look and feel	just started including "featured" search results which are NOT on my site
	2	6 months	05/2000	It is easy to find on the site and customizes the display of the information in order of relevancy.	It slows down the download of the pages considerable and sometimes will not load at all or create a backup and will information is lost.
	2	3 months	12/1999	-	I have to specifically instruct it to reindex when new information is added and it can only be reindex once every seven days
bravenet search	3	-	06/2001	good speed	to much advertising
CNIDR Isearch	2	5 years	11/2000	it finds the relevant documents.	Isearch returns only the URL and title of relevant documents. This isn't very useful on our site--our documents are huge--average between 500K and 1MB each. I'd like the results page to display excerpts from the document that show context.
DBtextworks Intranet Spider	3	2 months	04/1999	You can add fields and edit information in the database itself, eg. value added indexing terms and abstracts which aid retrieval. Total control over design of query screens and report formats. Every searching feature known to mankind (except proximity)- boolean within and across fields, field specific, range searching Will spider documents in a file directory too if asked to.	Not yet
Fast Site Search	5	one year	06/2001	relevant results, good performance, native xml indexing, and its pretty easy to use	no
Fluid Dynamics	4	1 week	08/1999	Good output, that is very important. No problems with administration. Easy to do, fast to crawl.	-
	2	3 months	02/1999	Records details of searches in a file.	Has peculiar case sensitivity - doesn't always find pages containing words in a different case. Only searches the site it is running on, would like it to also search other web sites that I specify.
	1	3-4 months	03/2000	Easy set up and template design.	Multiple directory levels cause problems and number of directories slows it down.
Hummingbird Seach Server (formerly Fulcrum)w	2	2 years	02/2001	-	-
	2	2 years	08/1999	fast, has vendor API	hard to maintain, not many new features, vanilla keyword searching, low throughput/not scalable
	2	1 month	07/2000	-	-
Google	3	2 years	02/2001	typing	-
Harvest	3	3 years	03/2000	Searching performance is good! Very flexible	can't do fuzzy search,only keywords
	2	4 years	11/1999	-	-
	2	4 years	04/1999	-	will no longer cope with newer developments, specifically can't cope with http v1.1 on server so much of site no longer indexed
	2	four years	03/2001	good indexing	slow search
HitBox Search	1	1 year	09/2000	fast	they don't re-index pages
HomePageSearch applet	2	5 months	08/2000	Free, easy and works	Much too slow
Hotlinks	4	1 month	12/1998	-	-
Hyperseek	1	1 year	11/1999	-	complicated to install and update - complicated user interface - to expensive
IBM NetQuestion	1	6 months	09/2000	Very little	Many symbols (eg. UK pound sign) not searchable. Differences in results returned between browsers. Keyword search only (limited to 5 words). Slow. Limited information about returned results. Ranking of results cannot be modified and seems random.
iCat	1	4 weeks	05/1999	-	questionable returns, obscure syntax, lack of insight into indexer
ICE	3	not yet	06/1999	it will be fast. It requires a keyword index; I'm trying to come up with a way to pick out proper people and place names to also treat as keywords.	[adaptation using ASP (perlscript, vbscript) and SQL DB] Difficult and time-consuming to implement
	2	2 years	01/2000	Reasonably fast	Prefer more options for user
	2	8 months	04/2000	Fast, easy to install & Customise, Free	Not terribly accurate, too dependant on titles and META tags, lack of configurablility
iFilter	4	6 months	07/1999	indexes CONTENT of PDF files	periodic incompatibilities between Adobe and Microsoft
Inquery 5.0	4	3 months	01/1999	-	-
Intelligent Miner for Text	2	1 year	07/2000	-	no Java API not enough sort criteria
Lotus Domino Search Version 4.6	3	Three years	06/2001	- It meets our business needs of being able to search based on field level. ie: language=english - It is free with the domino server.	- It has limitations on how to narrow searchs, therefore, making it less effective because it returns too many hits.
Lotus Search Engine	1	6 months	09/2000	-	-
Lycos Site Spider 1.0	2	8 months	02/1999	Easy to configure, returns results quickly	will not do "Fuzzy" or "Like" searches. Seems to be case sensitive.
Microsoft Site Server	2	1 year	06/2001	Indexing, unlimited catalogs	Excluding content is cumbersome
NetIS	5	2 years	09/1999	Full text search with advanced search options (wildcards, proximity, boolean etc.) Hit highlighting + pinpoint navigation Ability to fully customize the looks & feel + data display (for the user as well) through usage of CSS Ability to deal with super big databases Ability to do web-publishing through our engine Abiloity to perform page-sensitive banners and many more	NO.
OfficeVision/400	4	10 years	07/1999	Combined search of content and object descriptions	IBM are withdrawing support
Oneworld Search engine	1	two years	02/2001	Not much	Very slow, not accurate results
Oracle ConText	1	1 year	03/2000	No special entry rules	Need to search content of pages (HTML), not just titles.
Oracle InterMedia	-	not yet	05/2000	-	-
Perlfect	4	1 month	09/2000	Simple to install (also on more virtual servers) and easy to configure	nope, but maybe too little features
	2	1 Year	01/2000	Ease of use	Too generic the results returned.
Phantom	4	1 month	03/1999	Robot	not yet
	3	3 years	12/1998	Easy to customize Multiple logical indexes	Crawling is slow Data file is fragile- not robust
	2	-	12/2000	poorly	bug
	1	-	10/2000	-	-
PicoSearch	2	1 year	06/2000	quick and easy	no longer works
	2	1 week	06/1999	quick	never updated
	-	1 day	08/1999	-	-
PLWeb	1	3 months	03/1999	template configuration	big probblems creating a large index, data can only be added incementally
Qfinder	1	2 years	11/2000	-	slow and doesn't work well in client/server environment.
ResourceMiner	2	3 years	08/2000	It can do a content, natural language query and opens the PDF to the exact page of the hit. The hit words are highlighted.	Biggest problem is it only searches PDFs. It is hard for people to understand a natural language query when they are used to simple word matching.
Sambar	2	1 month	08/2000	-	can't spider other sites
Search Light	3	2 months	05/1999	-	-
Search Maestro	4	3 years	11/2000	Most things are OK.	Frozen development
SearchCSV	4	4 months	06/2001	Results returned	CGI Pathnames
sfe search (cgi written in pearl)	4	2 weeks	01/2001	either exact or close results. clean uncluttered index pages. Its free.	a bit difficult to implement for a nvice
Sinky Search Engine	1	2 months	07/1999	Nothing	I does not display any thing expcet the query in in the address bar
Site Server (Microsoft)	5	6 months	04/1999	Speed, Indexable properties	-
	3	1 month	10/1999	GOOD	-
	2	2 years	08/2000	-	-
	2	6 months	11/2000	works well for small site but we will be growing exponentially now	reporting is problematic and inadequate
	2	1 yr.	07/2001	Reasonble flexibility	not an out of the box solution
SiteMiner	2	1 month	11/1999	-	-
	1	1 day	03/2000	Ease of set up. Includes www search as well.	This site does not combine an index that includes my 4 different URL's.
SQL tablescans	2	1 week	10/2000	The amount of content is small enough so that it performs reasonably	It is a temporary solution, much functionality is needed and when sote load and content increase it will not work.
Surf Map	2	9 months	11/2000	Includes site map with search function	Very slow, doesn't always find content it should
unknown	3	3 months	10/2000	all	ok
unknown	1	about a year	01/2001	it produces results	not designed, sometimes no good relevance
WAIS	3	4 years	03/1999	fast, easy to administer, contols of "look and feel" with templates, etc.	limited search results display options (i.e. it returns a "headline" which cannot be fielded or otherwise specified, except in terms of no. of characters.; no option to search within a search, or save searches.
	2	4 years	01/1999	-	slow
	2	3 years	01/1999	-	we don't have the budget to customize it properly (i.e., utilize our documents' inherent structure, properly leverage the documents' keywords which come from controlled vocabularies]
web-search/dataeasy	2	A couple of years	02/2001	-	Difficult to make it see the diference between "kansas," and "Arkansas"
WebBoard	4	don't know	10/2000	Over all the Oreilly's WebBoard is a good package, but the search tool doesn't search document attatchments.	search tool doesn't search document attatchments.
WebIndex / WebFind	1	5 years	06/2000	It doesn't work very well at all.	It returns a very long list and often the list of items is irrelavent. Doesn't provide enough information about the file. Doesn't search the mega tags.
	1	3 years	05/1999	can run on schedule, allows us to exclude files based on file names contains, file title contains	takes too long to create and merge indices, not always accurate
WebSTAR Search	4	1 year	02/1999	Natural language query results are very accurate (usually the answer I am looking for is in the top 3 results)	People don't understand how to do natural language queries, bad PDFs can corrupt the entire index.
WhatUSeek	3	1 year	12/1999	Keyword search	Lack of updating
	2	6 months	04/2000	it's there. has soundex...	cannot sort by date. indexes different number of pages each time spidering done.. no help link... no email contact for help.
	1	6 months	09/2000	-	I suspect there is some limit, but I have no documentation or statement from the search provider.

 

July 2001 Survey Results

Sites & Search
 - Why Install
 - Why Not Installed
 - Site Sizes
 - Update Rate
 - Server Location
 - Languages
 - Multilingual Sites
 - File Formats

Ratings
 - Summary
 - Popular
 - Custom
 - Others