Search Tools Product Reports

Oracle Secure Enterprise Search and interMedia Search

Secure Enterprise Search Product Information - full text search engine
  Oracle SES OTN Home - tech network page
  "Text Search" and "Ultra Search" seem to have been phased out after release 9i

Multimedia [Search] Technical Information

Price: apparently included with Oracle 9i
Platforms: Unix: Solaris, Linux; Windows: NT, 2000, etc.

Features

• Closely integrated with Oracle database structures, spanning multiple text columns.
• Indexes content from the database, file system, web via URL or programmatic source.
• Indexes text from over 150 file formats including HTML, XML, PDF, Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint.
• Multilingual, including English, Dutch, French, Spanish, German, Japanese, Korean, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese and character sets ASCII, UTF-8, JA165JIS, GBK, BIG5.
• Integrated security and access control with database rules.
• Catalog indexes designed for short text and numeric data retrieval, updated automatically.
• SQL queries include operators such as "near".
• Supports Boolean queries.
• XPath query commands and XML nested and attribute value search.
• Options to query with wildcards and substrings (must be set in index).
• Query with distance setting, in same sentence or paragraph
• Phonetic (sound-alike) matching, fuzzy matching, stemming.
• Options for synonyms and more complex thesaurus functions.
• Editable stopword list.
• Search on specified punctuation.
• Relevance ranking for results, based on TF-IDF and theme weighting.
• User or system can adjust some relevance aspects.
• Retrieval tested at TREC with good results.
• Shows HTML version of source files with search terms highlighted.
• Search admin uses Oracle Enterprise Manager.
• Automatic classification, filtering, clustering, and personalization options.
• Text mining to extract themes and gists from indexed documents.
• Scales using replication, synchronization, partitioning and parallelism.

  Oracle interMedia Search

  • multimedia asset management
  • previously included text search
  • offers search for audio and video content

WebAssist QueryBuilder is an object extension for Macromedia Dreamweaver Ultradev that provides a wizard to create complex search and result pages.

Articles & Reviews

• Technology ULTRA SEARCH: Sophisticated Mining with Oracle Text Oracle Magazine, May 2002 by Douglas Scherer
  Presents Text and Ultra Search as a core component of document management. Describes how Ultra Search can combine multiple source times into a single searchable index. Helpful explanation of how it's all put together, covering the most important options of the configuration.
  
  
• Document Warehousing and Content Management: ETL Meets Content Management DM Review Online, October 2001 by Dan Sullivan
  Describes the many ways to use the new Oracle Ultra Search to deal with the information assets of an organization.
  
  
• Adding file storage to site wide search Ars Digita Bulletin Board; October 11, 2001 by Michael Bryzek
  Useful advice for indexing non-text binary files. Also describes situations in which interMedia indexes get corrupted.
  
  
• Providing Site-wide Full-Text Search with Oracle interMedia Ars Digita Systems Journal, September 8, 2000 by Michael Bryzek
  Technical description of the process used to implement interMedia, synchronizing tables, merging columns, updating data, creating and updating indexes

Examples

• Scottish Parliament (UK)
• GuideStar - donor's guide to charitable giving
• Volunteer Solutions - matching volunteers and organizations