site text search

Aaron Crane perl at aaroncrane.co.uk
Thu Feb 9 11:12:52 GMT 2006


Dirk Koopman writes:
> I am, just for now, using http://swish-e.org One of the reasons for this
> is that I have used it (long ago) in the past and also I find it (much)
> faster and much easier to have several instances of than htdig. The fact
> that is does not use a whole 512Mb (+ all the swap and then core dump
> and fail) on a website of about 30MB is also a point in its favour. I
> have used it on much larger ones.

I have some familiarity with Swish-e, and, yes, it seems to be pretty
fast at both indexing and searching.  And the Perl interface is entirely
good enough.

But I'd be wary of trying to use it on a new project any time soon:

  - It has no Unicode support (though you can use any 8-bit character
    set).  Apparently this is due to be fixed in version 3.0, but I've
    no idea of how soon that's expected.

  - It doesn't support deleting documents from an index, or reindexing
    changed documents that are already in the index.  The current stable
    version can be built with ./configure --enable-incremental to do
    that, but it's described as an experimental feature.  Again, the
    plan seems to be for version 3.0 to do this properly.

-- 
Aaron Crane


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