As of January, 2012, this site is no longer being updated, due to work and health issues

Search Tools Product Report

Perlfect

Product Information

Price: Free under a GPL open source license; installation available for a small fee.
Platform: Perl CGI for Windows NT and various flavors of Unix using DB_File.

Patches for Perlfect are available from a third-party developer, adding such features as phrase searching and wildcards.

Features

• Local file system or remote robot indexing. Creates a compact inverted index.
  
• Can exclude files and directories.
  
• Indexes PDF using pdftotext and MS Word files using antiword.
  
• Searches by keywords, accepts Internet Query Operators.
  
• Keyword highlighting in search results.
  
• Configurable stopwords list and minimum word-length restrictions for the index.
  
• Index process can be initiated via a web form.
  
• Results page can be shown in many different languages.
  
• Simple HTML template customization for results pages.
  
• Automated installation.

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.


• Rating Page CGI Resource Index: as of January 2007
  
  Gets 4 of 5 stars from 24 ratings. User comments include "Best for use with small sites" and some circa-2000 complaints about installing in Windows.

Examples

• Archiving Early America - Digital archive of primary source historical materials.
• Alliance for Human Research Protection - A national network dedicated to advancing responsible and ethical medical research practices involving human subjects.
• Defcon1 - FreeBSD help, articles, and scripts.