Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!dptg!rutgers!apple!bionet!agate!garnet.berkeley.edu!andy
From: andy@garnet.berkeley.edu (Andy Lieberman)
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Subject: looking for text retrieval software
Message-ID: <1989Aug30.204014.27985@agate.uucp>
Date: 30 Aug 89 20:40:14 GMT
Sender: usenet@agate.uucp (USENET Administrator;;;;ZU44)
Reply-To: andy@garnet.berkeley.edu (Andy Lieberman)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley (Library Systems Office)
Lines: 27

We're looking for a full text information retrieval package that runs on
UNIX (the more flavors the better).  The plan is to write our own user interface
(client) that communicates to a unix server that we also write.  The unix 
server will take the clients search requests and communicate them to the 
search engine and pass the search results back to the client.

The search engine must be able to do keyword boolean searches.  Word-proximity
searching, weighted searching are also of interest.

The search engine must have a good programming interface.  It would be nice if
there was a run-time version of the search engine available so we don't have 
to buy a full package for every machine.  Although, utilities for maintaining
the database are also a consideration.

I am currently looking at BRS/Search and Topic by Verity.  These both seem
acceptable, but I would like to know of any other choices on the market.
Comments about BRS/Search and Topic are also welcome (I already have their 
literature, so I'd be more interested in opinion than fact.)  Are there any 
journals or magazines I should be reading?  It seems that everything I hear
about is SQL...

Please mail responses and I'll post a summary.

Thanks,
Andy Lieberman
Library Systems Office
UC Berkeley