Have you ever tried to search a document you saved from a Web site? It's hard to do sophisticated searches without a special engine. The same is true for your customers.
Many imaging companies send out Web sites or HTML text documents on CDs. ISYS for IntraDisk from ISYS (Englewood, CO 303-689-9998) adds functionality to HTML documents. In their marketing words, "It puts the search button back on your HTML pages."
ISYS for IntraDisk indexes your Web site with a sophisticated search engine. Limit searches to paragraphs beginning with a certain word. Find text located within 10 words of other text.
You're essentially putting a copy of the ISYS search engine on every CD you send out. Documents are indexed by ISYS indexer. The software costs $2,000. The search engine licensing is free.
When we made Harry's CT Expo CD we spent hours teaching someone to build a search engine to index the CD. Much of the data was HTML documents. This product would have saved hours of work.
ISYS provides a sample document. It's their Web site -- fully indexed. I tried it. It's easier to test search capabilities if I was familiar with the site. I turned to our Webmaster Freddie Golino.
We launched ISYSBLDR.EXE. A Window popped up. It lets you request the publication root directory. You're looking for the directory that holds your Web pages. Once you select the directory press "Create New Index." Watch it do its stuff!
First we tried an old Web site Freddie created with more than 700 pages. It had long file names. Initially we were impressed. Pages were indexed fairly fast. Then the system started bottlenecking. It slowed down and stumbled over long file names. One reason was Fred's machine was running six applications simultaneously. The literature says stay away from long file names to achieve true cross-platform compatibility with the HTML documents.
We tried a smaller site. In two minutes it indexed 125 pages. It produced a report telling us there were 41,077 words and 8,515 distinct words.
We then added the ISYS search engine to the site. It took Fred five minutes to figure this out. He said: "You have to be a Webmaster with access to the Web server to really use this stuff." I agreed. It took me half an hour to figure out I needed help. I'm still not sure how he made it work. He says you just drag ISYSSRCH.IIP into the directory you just indexed.
Once he got it fully working in 15 minutes, he liked what it did. He thought it was a great way to find mistakes quickly in a Web site. His main complaint is that you can't index sites that aren't yours. That's not the point of this software. It's a tool to give your customers to search your HTML documents easily.
