Re: [cobalt-developers] Search Engine Recommendations Research

[Dave Stevens <dstevens@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

>I prefer to use swish-e http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/SWISH-E/
>Very nice and very configurable.  Works fairly well on our
>Solaris stations, RedHat and Slackware intel boxes, as well
>as on the RaQ and RaQ2.

I've been using Swish-e for a couple of years now.  It does work well, but
on the RaQ2, to index 40,000 files takes about 10 hours, compared to 2
hours on one of our Solaris boxes.  Of course the Solaris box has much more
RAM, 1 GB compared to 256MB; 2-300Mhz compared to a single 250Mhz; and a
SCSI RAID, compared to EIDE.

I've also used Ultraseek, and while it seemed to index faster,  it cost a
fair amount to license for that large a site.  I didn't really find an
advantage with Ultraseek, but I'm not what you might call a search engine
guy.

To the original poster, if you are only using mySQL to store and search the
indices, as the previous poster mentioned, Swish-e provides a way to do
that without using a DBMS.  If you store other data in your db, then it
might make sense, but if you are just storing and retrieving index data for
your searches, there is most likely less overhead involved by using the
stuff from Swish-e.

Dave