Search Tools Product Reports

Glimpse & WebGlimpse

Product Information (new site)
Original Glimpse Academic Project Site

Platforms: Unix: Solaris, SunOS openBSD, AIX, IRIX, Mach, OSF, Rhapsody (Mac OS X)
Price: free for noncommercial use, $200 for 1 company, 1 domain, fewer than 100 employees; $500 for 1 to 100 companies, fewer than 10 domains; $750 fewer than 100 domains; $2000 unlimited
Open Source

Features

Note that glimpse is the search engine (written in C) and webglimpse is the spider and indexer (primarily in Perl).

• Both binaries and source code distributed
• Robot spider and file system indexing
• Follow links from page through "neighborhood"
• Now recognizes HTML extended character codes
• Supports standard Boolean operators and wildcards.
• Limit search to recent files
• Partial matches and misspellings accepted
• Case sensitivity
• Multiple domains on a single server
• Hit highlighting and results in context
• Paid versions can specify a formula for results sorting.

Articles & Reviews

• Comparison of Free Search Engines SearchTools.com : April 2006 by Yiling Chen
  
  Concentrates on indexing, query processing, retrieval and relevance. Covers Alkaline, Fluid Dynamics, ht://Dig, Juggernautsearch, mnoGoSearch, Perlfect, SWISH-E, Webinator, and Webglimpse. All of these search engines are are free, mainly on Unix, and many are open source software.
• Comparing Open Source Indexers Infomotions Musings; May 29, 2001 by Eric Lease Morgan
  Describes the history and features of eight open-source search engines, freeWAIS-sf (aging code and hard to install, but good for searching email and public domain etexts); Harvest (powerful gathering features for frequently-changing data stores, good with structured documents); ht://Dig (tricky to configure, no phrase searching, automatic stemming and match word highlighting); Isearch (weak documentation and support, easy to install, dated interface, Z39.50 support); MPS Information Server (zippy indexing of both text and structured data, Z39.50 support, Perl API, limited documentation); SWISH-E (simple to install engine, CGIs in Perl and PHP still beta, good for HTML pages, recognizes new META tags, sorts results by field; WebGlimpse (easy to install and configure, requires commercial version for customized output); Yaz/Zebra (mainly Z39.50, no Perl API, mainl y a toolkit to index and respond to distributed client queries). Article also points out that chaotic information is less than helpful and encourages organization, structure and vocabulary control.
  
  
• Internal Search Engines Get You Where You Want To Go TechWeb October 15, 1997 by Barry Nance
  Good, thorough coverage of AltaVista eXtension 97, Folio siteDirector 3.1, Ultraseek 1.1, Inmagic/Lycos, DB/Text Intranet Spider, ISYS:Web 2.0, Maxum Phantom 2.0; Microsoft Index Server 3.0, Netscape Compass 3.0, Quadralay WebWorks Search 2.0, Verity IntelliServe 1.0, freeWAIS 0.3, WebGlimpse 4.0B1 and SWISH 1.1.
  
  
• WebGlimpse -- Combining Browsing and Searching Usenix presentation, January 10, 1997
  Contents of a presentation at the Usenix Technical Conference in early 1997, points out some major issues of context and location in searching that have not really been addressed by other tools.
  
  
• Web Site Search Engines (Appendices) The PIPER Letter: November, 1996
  Covers Basis Webserver , Excerpt, Excite, Folio, freeWAIS-sf, FrontPage, Fulcrum , Glimpse, ht://Dig, ICE, Isearch, PL Web, Swish, TEAMate, WebFind/WebIndex.

Examples

• National Law Center for Interamerican Free Trade
• US Department of Justice
• Search Shakespeare
• New York Subway System
• list of sites

Page Modified: 2007-03-23