Although Panoptic is not as full-featured as Kanisa and MondoSearch, it has the most intuitive administrative interface to manage the search process. After the installation from CD-ROM terminates, the system is almost ready to use with a Red Hat version of Linux.
Panoptic requires an Intel PIII 1-GHz processor with 512 MB of RAM and at least two 40-GB disk drives. Panoptic is flexible when it comes to the OS: It is the only participant that supports Linux, Windows and Sun Solaris, and the only product that supports SSL out of the box. The admin interface and the sample user interface support Internet Explorer, Mozilla and Netscape Web browsers. By default, the admin interface is available from a secure port (HTTPS, 443), while the sample user interface is available under the default port (HTTP, 80).
Like that of MondoSearch and dtSearch, Panoptic's sample user interface can be configured from the administrative interface. But without any configuration, the advanced-search form contained entries that leverage author and title metatags. You can also refine your query to search within your results if you receive too many hits. Panoptic supports all the major standards for metadata, including the Dublin Core. Our other participants support metadata but do not detail their support. And you also can limit your search by document type and date.
To begin the search process, you create a collection--a finite set of Web pages to index and search. If you have logical divisions in your Web content, you can distinguish them by collection to facilitate search and retrieval. For example, you can create separate "collections" distinguished by content type: news, sales support. This can narrow a user's search and increase the number of relevant documents returned.
We created a Web collection by giving it an external display name "Network Computing Magazine" and a unique internal name "nwcmag." Then we identified the collection as our Network Computing production site. As with Kanisa and MondoSearch, you can confine the content collection to specific pages such as those on the www.networkcomputing.com site or its alias www.nwc.com. That way, the Web crawler will not detour and follow off-site links. You can also limit the discovery depth from the starting URL. All four search engines in this review support deep link limitation.
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