As with our other participants, creating a collection or index involves configuring a spider to crawl a Web site. With dtSearch's spider, we had the fewest options but the fastest performance. It made more than 20,000 documents available within an hour. Unfortunately, in this case, haste made waste. It was our worst performer in the navigational search tests when using an automatic Boolean search for the keywords entered in a search form.
Once we had a working index of Network Computing content, we launched the Web installer from within the desktop version. dtSearch Web installs with a wizard that identifies the default Web site and a common directory to run script files. During installation, the wizard provides options to customize the user interface. You can select default search strategies from an extensive list of options including Boolean, proximity, and fuzzy searching that lets you find misspelled words in documents.
Turning to the report logs, dtSearch only keeps a log of exceptions. It does not keep a detailed crawler log like Panoptic does. When we viewed the exception log, there were only seven errors in the indexing process (HTTP 404 errors), and none of the errors related to any of the pages used in our navigational testing.
dtSearch comes cheap, has a snappy indexer, integrates easily with IIS and includes a usable search form out of the box. However, it lacks the features and control of its rivals in spidering and indexing content.
dtSearch Web. dtSearch Corp., (800) IT-FINDS. www.dtsearch.com
Sean Doherty is a technology editor and lawyer based at our Syracuse University Real-World Labs®. A former project manager and IT engineer at Syracuse University, he helped develop centrally supported applications and storage systems. Write to him at [email protected].
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