[Sigia-l] Comparing search engines

[Juan Sanchez]

Hello all. My first post on the list. While I do not consider myself an
IA (yet) I am working hard to learn as much as possible about the field.
My current background is in pure web development and as such I hope I
can bring a more technical angle to our discussions. So on to my
question.

Regarding the discussion about search engines, I feel I am missing
something with respect to the MS Index Server engine. It seems to me
that given sufficient IT knowledge, it is possible to harness this
engine to produce search results that are quite good (defined as you
may). The ability to expose the Index Server objects to programming can
lead to many types of search algorithims. Case in point, I have
configured our engine to catalog two simple meta-tags (desc, keywords)
but also keywords in PDF documents. At display time, I am able to mark
records as either HTML or PDF. Furthermore I can mark certain records as
restricted access content vs. free content.

Have any of you had +/- experiences with this engine? Anything I'm
missing about its capabilities?

Thanks,
Juan.