Once Kanisa was installed, it made 15,800 documents of Network Computing content available within eight hours. In the end, users access a sample user interface that could be generated and configured using ASPs or JSPs (Application or Java Server Pages). This makes the user interface more difficult to configure than the other products tested. But as long as you have the programming resources, a developer's programming guide is available to configure it to your site's requirements.
Kanisa was competitive in finding answers to our navigational questions, but fell short of Panoptic's prowess. For navigational searches, such as "Where is the editorial calendar," it returned an exact location for our 2001 editorial calendar. Because that did not satisfy the search, Kanisa included a pop-up box asking if we would like to see the rest of the results. Once we confirmed the need for more documents, it ranked our 2003 editorial calendar third on the list. If Kanisa cannot anticipate one correct answer to a query, it returns a list of documents relevant to the query grouped by guidance questions (see our Online First article, "Kanisa's Site Search: A Guided Search With NLP").
Although the documents available from Kanisa were the smallest set retrieved in our roundup, we did not consider this a disadvantage. Kanisa has the most control over the content-retrieval and indexing process. It breaks up the process into four segments--retrieve, normalize, summarize and index. During its spidering process to retrieve Network Computing content, it retrieved 58,590 URLs. But not all the documents were indexed because of errors in the normalization, summarization and indexing process.
The application console includes extensive reports generated from log files. We could view an exception report on Web site content that was not accepted for processing by status code (HTTP error code) and URL. Kanisa identified every URL--not just objectsthat was not found. For example, it included GIF and JPG files that were not found. It also included dynamic content generated to print articles. After the retrieval process, Kanisa normalizes or examines each document for valid content, language and document characteristics. You can configure and filter out unwanted document types and convert supported binary documents to HTML for indexing.
Moving beyond the normalization process, Kanisa summarizes documents by extracting unique titles and descriptions from metadata or from the document text. Like MondoSearch, Kanisa lets you view document URLs that failed the summarizing process. But MondoSearch makes it much easier to drill down a directory tree and ferret out an error. Kanisa forces you to wade through the report by URL in alphabetical order.
Discover the benefits of scalable backbone and network services for application and cloud providers.
Network automation is gaining momentum. Here's how you can drive this powerful technology to its full potential.
Subsea cable alternatives can provide a level of comfort for those concerned about disruptions. Realistically, they will continue to play a small, but critical role in the short term.
