Open Source Analog to Microsoft's Index Server? 38
An Anonymous Coward asks: "I have been tasked by my noble employer to find a better way accessing the 4,000 odd management documents and procedures we have. Currently MS Index Server is being used to provide a fairly good searching system. Index Server (for those that don't know) trawls through files and indexes their content.. ASP is then used to search the resulting database. My question is, there has to be a way to do this with nice open source software? Does anyone know of any competitors to index server that can index microsoft office documents? Thanks!" Might not HT://dig be a good foundation on which to build such a system?
Not Open Source, but... (Score:2, Interesting)
--Fifster
Google? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Google? (Score:4, Interesting)
However, this is not open source, it is not free and doesn't at all meet the goals of the person asking the question.
Re:Google? (Score:1)
Re:Google? (Score:1)
Re:Google? (Score:3, Funny)
-- for the irony impaired this is humor --
Re:Google? (Score:2)
two I tried (Score:3, Interesting)
I tried mnogosearch and swish-e. Different plusses and minuses. Later on I discovered that mnogosearch has a PHP front end and can be installed from a Debian package.
My advice is to set up two entirely different search databases. Otherwise it's very difficult to compare hits, ranking performance, or discovered differences in the lexeme policy.
Re:two I tried (Score:1)
Ironic (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine if the poster's company didn't have all their documents in a proprietary format. They would have plenty of other indexing programs available to them.
And think, if that gigantic percentage of businesses didn't have their information trapped in a proprietary information format, there'd be even MORE solutions in the marketplace to choose from.
When you don't come up with a cheaper and quicker solution, be sure to let your boss know it has just a little something to do with a proprietary format on a proprietary platform sold by a monopolist.
Happy Sunday!
Re:Ironic (Score:2)
I've always wondered whether M'soft themselves use Index Server. God knows the KnowledgeBase search is awful, and if they do eat their own dog food it's a terrible advertisement.
Re:Ironic (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Ironic (Score:2)
Re:Ironic (Score:2)
HT://Dig (Score:2)
Have you ever tried using an HT://dig search? I despise that search tool on the basis that the results it throws back are not ranked all that well and (this is easily fixed) ugly.
It's been a while since I've checked it out, maybe it has improved.
Re:HT://Dig (Score:1)
and (this is easily fixed) ugly
Agreed, I have wrapped my htdig in a PHP readfile( ); call and used some javascript in the htdig header and long templates to do alternating table row background colors (don't forget the <noscript><tr></noscript> as a fallback if you do this).
ASPSeek worked well for me.. (Score:5, Informative)
Namazu and Bool (Score:2, Interesting)
To me, Namazu and Bool sound promising, but some others are discussed there as well.
TWiki is a Perl and cgi based wiki, and Namazu seems to be able to integrate into a
Hope this helps!
Zope and DocumentLibary (Score:2, Interesting)
Apache Lucene (Score:4, Informative)
I highly recommend taking a look at the Apache Lucene Project, at http://jakarta.apache.org/lucene/ [apache.org]
It's a full text search engine API, so some coding for your specific requirements would be required. However, it's fast, extremely flexible, and has a pluggable interface for documents. It comes with native support for plain text, and for proprietry document types, we've written simple wrappers around tools like "pdf2text" and "catdoc" to index PDF's and Word docs.
and Apache POI (Score:2, Informative)
Much talk has been made of intergrating Lucene + POI to provide indexing of MS Office Docs, but I don't what stage that is at.
Glimpse (Score:1)
glimpse (Score:2, Interesting)
I have done all of this before in a commercial environment using Glimpse and Perl.
I'd recommend you check out glimpse and webglimpse. They ought to do what you are after, for free.
Cheers
Stor
Some Perl Engines (Score:3, Interesting)
Try Xapian (Was commercial) (Score:2, Interesting)
It is based on an temporary open-source release of one of SmartLogik's products.
I swear by it and find it highly flexible.
I guess, though, unless you are a hacker - say capable of using to actually index your documents, you might want to wait for the next release.
I use it in preference to htdig, swish++ and others I have looked at and sadly left; xapian is very fast and easily passes the 2G limit systems such as swish++ suffer from, and supports dynamic aggregation of multiple indexes into one search!
Sam