Matrix, Search Engines: Open Text

Open Text Index

Key Links

• Simple Search: http://www.opentext.com/omw/f-omw.html
• Power Search: http://www.opentext.com/omw/f-omw-comp.html
• Weighted Search: http://www.opentext.com/omw/f-omw-rank.html

Organization

• The Open Text Index is strictly a searchable database of Web documents.
• The Web crawler and search engine are based on custom software products sold by the Open Text corporation.
• Among the 3 engines, users can perform: multiple keywords or phrases, complex Boolean queries, proximity searching, and weighted searches.
• The query software does not perform any sort of suffix management (you must enter in all variations of a keyword, such as plurals or alternate spellings), nor does it support wildcards or regular expressions.
• Both the Power Search and Weighted Search interfaces allow the user to specify what portions of a file to search for each keyword: fulltext, summary,
• There are no limits placed on the number of query terms or number of results returned for any given query.
• The data indexed in the database are Web pages, gopher links, and FTP files, but are not restricted by content.

Administration

• The database is maintained by automated search software which adds, removes, and updates links periodically.
• Queries tend to return within about 5-10 seconds.
• The database contains the fulltext of 5 Million Web documents, and indexes new links at the rate of 10s of thousands.
• Each of the search pages is very simple and easy to use, although it is rather difficult to navigate to the Weighted Search page or other pages not included in the navigation graphic.
• Additional Services
  • The service provides help for each kind of search interface: Simple Search, Power Search, and Weighted Search help pages.
  • Amoung the search pages, there is a search tutorial, to help new users get started with some of the simple features, and learn some of the more powerful toos.
  • The navigation graphic, although a bit large, is very modest and easy to use. However, there are many useful services that are not represented within the graphic.
  • Users are encouraged to submit pages for indexing in the database.
  • Search results include a URL, hyperlink, document title, extract, and a "search score". Each result includes a link for generating related queries, as well as a summary document which describes the keyword matches and how that document fell into the result set.