[Sigia-l] Thunderstone Search Appliance [was: RE: Google Appliance]

[dbedford at worldbank.org]

Gabriel,

A couple of quick questions about Thunderstone -- getting beyond the interface
to the real underlying search architecture:

   can you build parametric indexes with Thunderstone and do fielded searching,
   or do you just have the same huge full text index that the Google appliance
   delivers?
   are there separate loader and crawler programs which would allow me to
   include metadata from formal repositories and a web content management
   system?
   what access do you have to integrate classification schemes and thesauri into
   the query transformation?
   can you define the relevancy algorithm (Google's is hard coded into the index
   architecture and you cannot change it)
   can you sort results and narrow your search based on parameters (relates to
   the parametric index question above)?
   is it possible to build in a security classification sensitivity (ie will the
   loader program and the matching algorithms allow me to designate who
   can/cannot see which content)?

Thanks for considering my questions.   We're building an enterprise search and
actually find that we cannot use some crawlers/full-text search engines because
they do not support parametric search, do not respect security, and ignore our
knowledge organization structures.

Best regards,
Denise