Kanisa lets you implement special rules for indexing, but these affect all the collections and cannot be applied to discrete collections. Kanisa analyzes words, phrases and concepts in a document to determine their frequency and priority to come up with a score. Indexed scores determine a document's relevancy to an end user's question based on the natural language found in the question. You can assign a weight to a word or concept in a document based on its location in the document (such as title or body) and/or whether the word or concept is underlined, bolded or italicized. You can also configure metatag indexing and filter unwanted tags.
Document information such as title, description, URL location and index scores are combined in an answer matrix. The matrix is a semantic index driven by a dictionary of words and phrases called the Knowledge Layer. The Knowledge Layer interprets content in a Web site and matches it to queries from users. When you are ready to test the contents of your answer matrix, you can schedule Kanisa to generate a snapshot of it.
We installed most of Kanisa's components onto one server. There are six components: the answer matrix, the Knowledge Layer, the online query engine, the offline processing engine, the application console and the Data Mart. Once you become acquainted with how Kanisa works, you move the components to separate servers that exchange data using XML. But note the minimum hardware requirements: Pentium 4 (1 GHz), 512 MB of RAM and 40 GB of hard-disk space All-told, Kanisa would make a scalable search engine if your enterprise had a high priority to answer customer-support questions using Web-site content and external resources not available to HTTP--and you had a large budget for such a project.
Kanisa Site Search 5.0. Kanisa, (408) 863-5800. www.kanisa.com
Mondosoft's MondoSearch markets itself as a Web-site search engine created for the ordinary Web user. It aims to be user-friendly and capable of generating clear, useful results. Although we found this to be true, it did not perform as well as Panoptic or Kanisa in our navigational tests and came in second to Panoptic in indexing Network Computing's production Web site by making available 20,407 documents in just over five hours. MondoSearch took less time than Panoptic and Kanisa, but did not match the speedy indexing done by dtSearch.
MondoSearch was the only search engine we tested that could categorize Web site content automatically. Categories can provide context to searching and viewing results according to a document's subject matter, content type or other criteria. When you first use the crawler to grab content from a site, default categorization is applied and all pages are put in an "other" category. Once the initial site is grabbed and saved to the database, you can create categories unique to your site automatically or manually.
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