Search Engine Studio

Type of Program: Search Engine Creator
Supported Platforms: Windows 98/2Kx/XP/ME
Company Name: Xtreeme GmbH
Version: 4.0.1
Price: $99 and up

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The authors of this software say "Creating a search engine for your web site does not have to be difficult! With Search Engine Studio within a few minutes you can create a full-text search engine for your web site (works with any existing hosting) as a CGI or PHP script (or Java servlet), or you can even create an offline search engine for a CD-ROM / DVD distribution." and that is exactly what you can do with the greatest of ease.

To put it in simple terms this program scans and indexes documents using a web crawler (HTTP scan), local / network disk scan, FTP server scan or XML scan and from the results can create either a web or intranet or offline (CD/DVD) search engine.  There is a built in wizard (Site Assistant) to make things really simple for you as well another major plus is that it uses its own highly optimized database engine so there is absolutely no installation required on the server. All you need to do is follow a few easy steps of the assistant to have the program automatically index your website and then upload the required files to your server. Everything the search engine needs will be located on YOUR server without any references to other websites to ensure best possible performance. The search results will not display any ads or other unwanted content and for the first time you can FULLY customize the displayed result page appearance.

I got to grips with this program within 30 minutes and I do like the fact that you can fully customize the appearance of the search box using either a pre-defined set of search box options (e.g. date or document type selector, result count per page selector) or by adding custom HTML code and the search engine results can be freely formatted. Using the result formatting builder you can decide what each search result will contain (e.g. date, size, title, description or content preview) and exactly how the results will be displayed (you can set fonts, colors, links as well as e.g. put parts of results into different table cells). In fact, you can decide about EVERY detail of the formatting, including conditional inclusion of HTML code (e.g. images) based on document type or date.  All this allows you to blend in the search with your site style.  Searches can be word, phrase, boolean or wild card.

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Reviewed by Simon Baillie

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