Searching with a juggernaut

Continuing with our current search engine groove, in this issue we’ll look at a search system called Juggernautsearch from HyperProject (see links below). This product positions itself as a rival to the one discussed in our last issue, ht://Dig.

Unlike ht://Dig, Juggernautsearch is not a compiled program but rather a handful of Perl scripts, making it an altogether simpler installation and configuration prospect.

And because it is a Perl script, it is simple to get it running on any system that supports Perl (Windows NT/2000/XP and Red Hat Linux are the core supported platforms).

The company claims high performance: “The Juggernautsearch Engine has delivered 5 million unique page views per day using an Alpha CS40 configured with Linux Slackware 4.0. Benchmarked indexing at the rate of 50 URLs/second, it can index 500,000 URLs/day. Higher performance can be achieved using multiprocessor servers or enterprise systems.”

The free, open source version of Juggernautsearch consists of four main components: 

* Pagerunner, which searches the Internet.

* Librarian, which takes the results from the Pagerunner search.

* A set of scripts and HTML pages that provide the user query front-end.

* A set of scripts and HTML pages that provides banner advertising support on the search Web page.

The “Pro” version of Juggernautsearch does away with the banner ads and includes:

* Scripts to eliminate extraneous common English words, common Internet words, obscene words, and common URLs from your database.

* User configurable lists.

* Scripts to support production use with very large databases.

* Statistical reporting.

* The ability to index local files as well as Web pages.

* The ability to search for keywords as well as Web names.

* Keyword filters to remove “junk collected from the Internet.”

Hyperproject also offers three tools derived from Juggernautsearch:

* ScanOne, which scans a single Web page and returns its ranked keywords.

* ScanAdult, which also scans a single Web page and flags adult language.

* ScanJobs, which scans a single Web page for hiring and employment content.

Pricing for Juggernautsearch 1.0.1 (Linux only) is free (for personal use only) and for Juggernautsearch Pro (Windows and Linux) is $200. For Juggernautsearch Pro with ScanOne, ScanJobs and ScanAdult (Windows and Linux) the pricing is $275. If you want the additional tools separately, ScanOne (Windows and Linux) is $50; ScanJobs (Windows and Linux) is $65; and ScanAdult (Windows and Linux) is $145.