Tom Jordahl wrote:
> Sample questions:
> - Do you use our Search? Another technology? Why? Why not?
We use Verity search quite a bit. Why? Well it ships with CF and its
dead simple to set up. The only times we don't use it are when the
client already has an existing search technology they would prefer to
leverage. Or perhaps if we need to spider multiple sites and provide an
integrated collection.
> - Do you use a K2 server? Did you know it goes faster if you do? :-)
Sometimes we use K2 if the search is actually been hit quite a bit.
Generally we don't bother -- i think this is a bit of a legacy
"mind-set" issue in that you couldn't simply use the same collection
name for both VDK and K2 -- K2 required a unique alias name. And you
had to start and configure an additional service to run on the server.
Not all that hard but I gave up explaining it to folks over and over.
I can't remember if the aliasing issue was resolved in CFMX.
> - What document types do you index?
Mainly database queries and PDF. Occaisionally we'll be involved in an
intranet project where all sorts of file types are indexed.
> - How many documents do you index?
Varies greatly. As a side note, I'm not sure that individual records in
a DB query should be treated as individual documents. Why not do this
licensing on the basis of collection size?
> - How many collections do you have?
Our approach has generally been to have a separate collection per
document or content type. Makes it easier to offer advanced search
options and filtering.
> - What features do you like?
I really like that in CF all Verity collections look the same. So it
doesn't matter if you are working with PDF's or database queries or a
combination you can represent the results all in a single query.
> - What features are we missing?
-- maintenance
Maybe this is changed in later versions of Verity... but you really need
a better explanation of when to use CFINDEX actions, in particular
UPDATE vs REFRESH. An explanation of why and how often to OPTIMISE and
so on. So many folks give up on Verity because they update it so
inefficiently, don't optimise and wonder why it runs slowly. Actually
at that point most folk just say Verity "sucks hard" and cease wondering.
--spider
I find this spider thing a nightmare. Not really an issue with the
technology more an issue with the licensing. There are so many spiders
out there... why not make the Verity spider open beyond localhost? It's
not like it offers any huge competitive advantage -- I realise this is
more Verity than Macromedia.
--mapping alternative properties
I often find myself hacking the collection style files to include things
like datelastupdated in the query output. Perhaps for files at least
this should be there by default. What about file size, create date and
other metadata?? Much of this is already in there, just not exposed by
default in the CF/Verity gateway.
--additional search types
Fuzzy logic, synonym, phonetic and the like. I'd like to have the
option of setting up my own lexicon of terms to map to synonyms and the
like. These are all options in Verity Enterprise... so I'm not sure
what is on offer in their v5 SDK.
That's all I can think of for now.
-- geoff
http://www.daemon.com.au/
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