Microsoft Indexing service

[burf2000]

Does anyone have any great knowledge on this. I have benn using it for a while and find their is not a great abount of technical documents on how it ranks it documents within its database.

If you ever used to index your documents, it can produce some very wierd reponses

[dataguy]

Is this Simon? I think our paths have crossed before.

I think you are asking about MS full-text search within SQL Server, correct?

There is actually a great deal of information to be found on this. Try Googling 'MS full text search' or 'MS full text indexing'. The ranking algo is not the best, but there are a few things you can do to make it work better for you, as long as you don't have too many records to search through and plenty of RAM.

There are also a few companion products that can be added to SQL Server which will improve SQL Servers full text search capabilities. They often pop up on the right when searching the above phrases.

To be sure, MS FTS often falls short if you are trying to run a search engine. I can't wait to see what the improvements are for SQL Server 2005.

[burf2000]

It is Simon, hmm how did you know?

I am on about the built-in indexing service in win2k, XP and 2003

It is not a sql db but does have similar commands. It relies on scanning physical folders and files within this

I had it working with 5 milliona files and its not too bad!

[dataguy]

I am on about the built-in indexing service in win2k, XP and 2003

Hmmmm, now that's an interesting way of doing it. But since your not using a typical database you would probably be better off asking this question in the ASP/.NET forum.

I enjoy my anonymity here on WW, but we run similar sites and we are both members of the ISEDN.

I know full text search technology is an issue that constantly plagues me and many other members of the ISEDN. I wish there was a decent full text index on MySQL that we could implement and then just build out additional database servers when needed.

[burf2000]

This type of subject can is always discussed. Using the indexing server, it kind of takes some of the work away (even though used to do it myself)

I use it and then add my own rating info ontop

[Easy_Coder]

I've used index server on a couple of web applications. The ranking can be a little wonky at times based on text pattern matching.

The weird results somewhere have your parts or all of your [query] baked into the middle of a word.

[burf2000]

Do you have any suggestions or tips on using this?

I not tried the sql full text search yet, does that have any ranking systems