Webinator vs. other Indexers

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Thunderstone
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Webinator vs. other Indexers

Post by Thunderstone »



I'd be curious to know Thunderstone's appraisal of how the Webinator
commercial edition stacks up against the Verity and Ultraseek products that
cost upwards of $65,000 depending of docs indexed. I assume Webinator
indexes PDF files as well? Are we comparing apples and oranges here?


B. Preston Rich, FinanceNet Executive Director
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Thunderstone
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Webinator vs. other Indexers

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At 10:02 AM -0500 11/3/98, Rich, Benjamin P wrote:

Webinator stacks up very well indeed, in my research. And it's got a big
sister named Texis that's definitely enterprise-sized: it's the backend for
ZDNet and the eBay auction house.

Thunderstone does really good software, but their marketing needs work.

Avi
________________________________________________________________
Avi Rappoport <mailto:avirr@searchtools.com>
Search Tools Consulting: for all your site search and navigation needs
Guide to Site Indexing and Local Search Engines: <http://www.searchtools.com>


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Thunderstone
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Webinator vs. other Indexers

Post by Thunderstone »




Hmmm...

Thunderstone Verity Ultraseek
SEARCHING
Thesaurus Y N N
Regular expr. Y N N
Quantities Y N N
Fuzzy Y N N
Morphemes Y N some
Set logic Y N N
Find parents Y N N
Hit context Y N N
Tunable rank Y N N
Metasearch Y N N
Querys/Min 1000+ ? 900 (infoseek: number from site.
(thunderstone: 1 CPU 500Mhz Alpha,
1 gig ram, 2,000,000 documents)
CRAWLING
Table parse Y N N
Frame parse Y N N
Redirects Y N N
Crawl Domain Y N N
Bad link rept. Y N N
Depth control Y N N
Via Proxy Y N Y
DNS Cache Y N N
Duplicate stop Y N N
single offsite Y N N
Copy Y N N
Reauthor/link Y N N
File types 100+ 100+* 14 (Verity can only do this on Windows)

ADMINISTRATION
SQL interface Y N N
Index speed Fast Slow Medium
Index overhead Small Large Large
Fully customize Y N N
Collections Unlimited 16 unknown
UI Compiler Y N N
Cron-able Y N limited
Index expr. Y N N (defines what an indexable entry is)
Platforms 16+ 11* 5 (only windows verity has doc translation)

PRICE:

We're not trying to make a living off of Webinator. Thunderstone's revenue
comes from Texis, product royalties, and consulting. We made it
painfully inexpensive (or free) because we felt that site indexers would
become a standard commodity and we wanted to keep Excite, PLS, Fulcrum,
Verity, Infoseek, and Altavista from making too much money.

Verity's prices are ridiculous, anyone who pays them that much for their
software should probably be reprimanded for not doing due diligence.
Email I got from a large semiconductor firm said this in reference to
them:

Message 1 8/19/98 11:30 am:
...I am now running the Corporate Intranet for [name deleted] where,
sadly, they wasted a load of money on Verity. As you both know,
Search97 is terrible and I would very much like to look into Webinator
for the corporation.

Message 2 8/19/98 3:30 PM:
Showed her the free search index demo. "Are you telling
me we wasted $40K?" Much shaking of the head and sighs.
I'm going to see the UNIX admin now...

Infoseek has their web index to keep them afloat. Their prices are high,
but ours might be comparable if we removed Webinator's price supports.

We have a distinct advantage; we're a private R&D firm. We don't have to
target products at drooling neophytes in order to gain the attention
of Wall Street. Commoditization has already caused the demise of Fulcrum
and PLS, and investors in Verity might want to read their SEC filings
very carefully.

PRODUCT EFFICACY:

The real thing that differentiates Thunderstone from the rest of the pack
is Texis. No one else is even close to us in the area of core technology.
The Texis RDBMS & Vortex provide an extensible infrastructure for rapidly
adding new features and optimizations without turning the code into
bloated buggy spaghetti-ware.

different Top 100 site applications. We can lay claim to more of these
than any other vendor. The reason for this is due to the underlying
technology. We have the same advantages as our customers when it comes
to keeping Webinator the best product available. The ability for
the Webinator to "turn-on-a-dime" and react to the individual needs of
its users is a reflection of our overall product strategy.

Most of the products we compete with are just a lot of user interface
code over the top of product cores that are less sophisticated than WAIS.

Thanks and sorry for the run-on sales pitch in this otherwise technical
group.

Bart Richards
Thunderstone


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