About Excite for Web Servers
Excite for Web Servers brings Excite, Inc.'s second generation media navigation tools
to Internet Web Servers turn-key, "plug-and-play" package that offers easy installation and requires no programming. Key features include:
Concept-Based Text
Searching
Excite for Web Servers enables users to search for information by concept rather
than by key-word. For example, an attorney investigating the latest
developments on "intellectual property rights" can retrieve
information on software piracy and copyright law even if the relevant
documents contain none of the key-words in the query. This means that
users can easily find the documents that interest them even if they
don't know the exact key-words necessary to describe their search to a
traditional information retrieval system. Excite for Web Servers's concept-based
searching engine is able to determine related concepts from document
collections, eliminating the need for an external, manually-defined
representation of knowledge (such as a large and un-maintainable
thesaurus or "knowledge base").
Interactive Browsing
Excite for Web Servers offers capabilities that go beyond the scope of traditional
information retrieval tools. Most text search companies focus on a
very narrow problem: finding information for users who (1) know
exactly what they are looking for, and (2) know the right key-words to
describe their interest. An example of this kind of situation is a user who would like to locate an analyst report
about a particular company in which he's considering investing. Like first generation text
search engines, Excite for Web Servers addresses this need.
At other times, however, this same
user may want to "look for interesting investment ideas." He wants to browse
the available information. This is where Excite, Inc. is so different from the earlier tools. Excite, Inc.
offers not only the best retrieval tools, but also
a suite of interactive browsing tools that can help users
navigate unfamiliar collections of information. Browsing features include:
-
Query-by-Example allows users to say "find more documents like
this one" with the click of a button.
- Automatic Subject
Grouping allows users to view the results of a query grouped by
subject. Each group contains documents that are similar to one
another.
- Automatic Abstracting creates a short
summary or abstract of a long document, selecting the important
concepts and presenting them in a concise format.
Specifications
- Performance
- Index size: Our sophisticated index compression technology yields indexes are typically less than 15% of the
size of the documents being indexed. First generation search engines typically require indexes
that are 2 to 7 times larger. Our technology
permits a great deal more of the index to be in memory, which
increases searching speed.
- Indexing speed: The Excite, Inc. search engine indexes up to
300MB/hour on a Sparcstation 20 (single processor, 60 MHZ).
- Retrieval speed: Concept-based searching takes 1-2 seconds
(or less), even on large databases (exclusive of network latency).
- Platforms
- The Excite, Inc. engine runs on Windows NT and a variety of Unix
platforms, including SunOS, Solaris, SGI, HP-UX, AIX, and BSDI.
The search engine is designed for easy integration with any
Web Server.
- Flexibility and Usability
- Support for HTML and ASCII documents.
- Simple, natural-language user interface. Keyword and boolean searching also supported.