Intranet indexing

[steve]

Apologies if this is an inappropriate message...

I am wanting to provide a search engine style facility for my company's internal files.

These files are a mixture of Word, Excel, Text, Html, Pictures, Pdf, Part lists, our own specific files etc.
Where a file is of a type it cannot automatically index (eg a picture) I'd like it to refer it to a human and ask for a brief summary to be provided (EG "Picture of ACME model 123 installation".

I would like to get a spider to roam our server and network, sort out new files and index them, so that we can use a search engine to find relevant data from web browsers on our Lan.

Does anyone make such a product? If so who? This is obviously more than a raw "*.htm" spider, but I don't know where you get those from either.

[oilman]

I had to look into this once awhile ago so I apologize if my answer is vague but maybe it will help narrow your search.

The company I spoke to said there was no such spider commercially available but you could have on custom built or you could convert your server to an 'index server'.

I never got to see the project through to completion so I can't tell you what happened but I thought I would pass this info along.

ps - I fully expect to be corrected by Brett in about 3 seconds

[steve]

Thanks - at least that meake me feel the question wasn't too dumb.

Two things:

What is an Index server (and where would I get one if it should prove useful).

Do you have any specific suggestions as to who is sensible to contact about customising such a "spider"?

Cheers

[Brett_Tabke]

My 3 seconds up?

That is a very difficult proposition. Did you ever come up with a solution? I would love to hear about it if you did.

Most of the softare available (like Ultraseek or even I believe altavista) run $10-20k. I don't know of any reasonably priced software that allows you to index that many different types of docs.

[Murrayson]

Use Microsoft Index Server. It was designed for this exact purpose. You will have to map the drives you wish to index. It will not crawl ... but crawling is impractical on an intranet anyway, they consists of shares not ports.

Index Server is part of the Option Pack for NT4 or It is now part of Win2000 indexing services.

[oilman]

Follow up to me previous post.

The company wound up getting the local DeVRY technical college to use the idea as a project for one of their classes. A group of students built a custom engine app (for free). It is pretty slick and they tied for best project in the school. I have no idea how much time (in hours) it took but it would probably be pretty pricey if they had to pay.