We sent invitations to 11 vendors. Four stepped up to the table: CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation), Kanisa, Mondosoft and dtSearch Corp. Each sent software products to our Syracuse University Real-World Labs®.
The companies that dropped out, declined or just didn't qualify ran the gamut from small to large. Copernic Technologies didn't qualify because its product doesn't support ODBC or JDBC. Autonomy Corp. and EasyAsk declined to participate but gave no reason. Convera, Dieselpoint and Fast Search & Transfer each said it is working on a new version of its software and declined. Both Verity and Google declined to participate on the basis of company policy, though Verity was changing its policy as this article went to press.
As for our four contestants, we tested their ability to satisfy navigational searches by using Network Computing's production Web site (www.nwc.com), which contains almost 35,000 pages (see "How We Tested,"). We also tested indexing and searching capabilities using informational searches taken directly from the log files on www.nwc.com. Three of the four products we tested performed above average. Only dtSearch came in under par.
We judged the search engines on their ability to retrieve content using an indexer, also called a spider or crawler. We put a heavy emphasis on the search process, including how much control the administrator could assert, and assessed the amount of control that could be applied as well as the overall performance in navigational searches. We also looked at each vendor's management console and how it accomplished installation, configuration and customization tasks on the search-engine portion. And we considered log files and reporting capabilities. Prices were compared across the board.
Panoptic Enterprise Search Engine won our Editor's Choice award. Its secure and easy-to-use administrative interface, navigational deftness and indexing prowess put it on top.
Panoptic achieved the best performance in our navigational searches, proved to be the best indexer out of the box and offers the best price-to-feature ratio. And best of all, installation and configuration were a breeze compared with that of Kanisa Site Search, which requires a number of postinstallation steps to configure IIS and enable the file system for use.
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