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Search Tools Product Reports

Smartlogik Discover (APR)

see also: Xapian

Product Information

Platforms: Windows NT, 2000; Unix: Sun Solaris, others on request
Pricing: Typical projects range from about £150,000 to £450,000 for deployment and the license fee.

Background

The Muscat search engine comes from research performed by Dr. Martin Porter of Cambridge University (UK), and was commercialized in 1984 by Cambridge CD Publishing. It was subsequently sold to MAID which became The Dialog Corporation and in 2000 changed its name to Bright Station plc: it seems to have been spun off in 2001 to Smartlogik. In April 2002, the assets of Smartlogik were bought by Applied Psychology Research Ltd. APR offers support for existing users of Muscat/Smartlogik software and continues to develop products based on the technology.

June 2002: Muscat users can contact Lemur Consulting for support such as a spidering/indexing system.

Features

• Can index free text such as web pages
• Also has tools for extracting data from structured datasets like Oracle or Lotus Notes.
• It applies probability theory and linguistic inference algorithms to natural language searching.
• Performs language recognition and language-specific stemming.
• Stopword removal.
• Noun and document structure recognition, word position analysis.
• Find similar documents feature.
• Also supports Boolean and wildcard searching.
• Dynamic word weighting gives priority to rare words.
• Personalized alerting (also known as filtering or current awareness).
• Flexible configuration features.
• J2EE, XML and API integration.

Articles

• Unstructured Information Management Report Infosphere, March, 2003 by Magnus Stensmo and Mikael Thorson, $325/€295 for a single PDF license
  General report on search and categorization tools. Describes how the APR Smartlogik search and categorization system integrates with user profiling for better results. Considers this to be a "solid market offering".
  
• Seeking far and wide for the right data InfoWorld, August 27 / September 3, 2001 by Cathleen Moore.
  Describes the value of search engines and categorization as essential elements of corporate portal infrastructures, to handle the "deluge" of information within enterprises. Quotes Aberdeen analyst Guy Creese who points out that without a good way to search, corporations would be "blowing their investment in the content". Covers recent announcements of search and categorization features by Autonomy, Verity, AltaVista, iPhrase, and Smartlogik (Muscat).
  
  
• Search technology gains recognition InfoWorld, July 30, 2001 by Cathleen Moore
  Covers search and categorization technology for corporations from Verity and Smartlogik (Muscat). Includes analyst quotes about the importance of search in handling huge amounts of content. Describes Verity "Social Networks" using business rules to make taxonomies more useful. Smartlogik's Muscatdiscovery search engine stresses natural-language searching, Muscatstructure provides rules-based categorization, both can integrate into application servers using Java or COM+.

Page Updated 2003-07-23