On Tue, 10 Sep 2002, Brian Kelly wrote:
> A sales rep from Inktomi is coming to see me on Friday. I know that the
> Inktomi (nee Ultraseek) search engine is used by a small but growing
> number of Universities and that those that do use it seem to like it.
>
> I'd be interested to hear from those who do use it - how good is it; is
> it worth paying for an (expensive?) licensed product when there are open
> source tools such as ht://Dig; are you using any of the advanced
> facilities (e.g. indexing structured metadata, using the APIs, ...);
> have you had any problems with it; etc.
At the University of Cambridge we have been using Inktomi, and previously
Ultraseek, for a long time. Our current public search server
(http://web-search.cam.ac.uk/) is actually based on an embarrassingly old
version, but we have a new server based on the current Inktomi due for
release 'real soon now'.
We like it a lot and frankly couldn't manage without it. We, or rather my
colleagues, have done quite a lot of customisation to the way it works,
including support for 'packaged' searches of individual institution sites
(see http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/web-search/ for some idea of the things we
encourage people to do with it). However the customisation is not easy to
maintain, and is largely the reason we've not managed to move to a newer
version sooner. Our experience of Inktomi support, even on customisation
issues, has been largely very good.
The recurrent cost is an issue, though we did a good deal with Infoseek in
the early days. We're currently indexing of the order of 450,000 documents
and are rather hoping that we can avoid having to move to the next
licencing step since that would probably prove prohibitively expensive.
Jon.
--
Jon Warbrick
Web/News Development, Computing Service, University of Cambridge
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