Table of Contents
Welcome to searchbox, the focuseek Content Gathering product.
searchbox is the new kind of application which carry in your Intranet the full power of a high performance Search Engine for digital contents together with many other feature previously available only in high-end Content Management Systems.
Here's a closer look at a few of searchbox many features:
Gathering contents from virtually any kind of digital sources
Indexing of most widespread document formats
Semantic content tagging
Extremely fast and flexible content retrieval
Availability as standard Web Service (.NET compatible)
Internal plug-in system to implement new custom features
Easy to user Graphical Administration Tool
Small footprint
Super fast installation procedure
Multiplatform availability (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X)
searchbox Engine. The server component of searchbox; all services provided by this component are remotely accessible through a standard SOAP API.
Control Panel. The administration tool of searchbox Engine. It will be installed on the same server of the Engine but can be also used remotely by multiple users . It communicates with the Engine through the SOAP interface.
Documentation. HTML, PDF and Windows help (Windows version only) formats.
Examples. The full source of some programming examples involving searchbox API
Your searchbox documentation consists of several books: the User's Guide (this book), a Programmer's Reference Guide, and the CookBook.
The User's Guide tells you how to install searchbox on your server, and provide a basic tutorial and other information to get you going right away. It also contains a detailed description of all searchbox features and how they can be accessed through the provided graphical administration tool (Control Panel).
The Programmer's Reference Guide is a concise comprehensive, listing of searchbox APIs devoted to integrators and programmers.
The CookBook is really like a "cooking book", a simple step-by-step guide to implementing software solutions that have searchbox as the common ingredient. You will learn how searchbox can solve with a small integration effort a lot of common issues.
Beginners should thoroughly read the first few chapter in the User's Guide while if you are a searchbox experienced user you'll probably only need to browse the description of the new features and go directly trying them on your working searchbox installation.
In this manual you can find how to install searchbox in the best way for your own needs, a brief tutorial of general concepts about search engines, the description of searchbox philosophy and components, a quick start tutorial and an analytical description of every feature exposed by searchbox with live screenshot taken from the Control Panel graphical administration tool.
Finally a detailed description of functionality and configuration issues of all bundled plugins is included.
searchbox runs on x86 PCs and Apple Macintosh PPC computers
searchbox requires:
an x86 or PPC based server with single or double CPU running at 1GHz
Windows 2000/XP, Linux Red Hat AS4/Suse 9.2 for x86 architecture and Mac OS X 10.4.x for PPC or Intel architecture
at least 512MB of RAM
at least 20GB of free disk space
a 100Mb/s Ethernet adapter
an Internet connection
As you can see the basic hardware requirements needed by searchbox can be easily found in any low cost PC but the overall performance of the system will be highly determined by an accurate choice of any single component you choose. Here they are some tips about critical feature that you should care of in a searchbox dedicated server:
The processor clock frequency is not critical as one can think. Last generation processors like Pentium 4 or G5 are is perfectly suitable for an out-of-the box searchbox deployment. In the case you need to run other processes on the same server and/or some searchbox plugins that require some specific computing power an increment of processors number and of their frequency should be considered.
The RAM amount is very critical if you let many users access the searchbox at the same time (eg. number of query/sec); for a small/medium enterprise installation we suggest at least 1Gb of RAM. Also ECC RAM is highly recommended.
Fast disk are the other very critical parameter to be considered in choosing a server. We recommend do not try to install searchbox on NFS partitions
If you plan to gather information from Internet the necessary bandwidth is needed. Actual high speed xDSL connections are usually enough for this purpose. In the case you need to offer a public service to users outside your organization consider to install searchbox in a server farm of a Internet provider.
Even if searchbox can be installed on virtual machines as those produced by VMWare, its not recommended for production environment. Some our internal test has reveled a significative decrease of performances in this type of searchbox installations.