| Overview | Features | Screenshots |
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Open-SearchEngine provides DotNetNuke with a true enterprise search engine capable of indexing html content as well as documents from multiple sites and/or physical directories.
Being based on Lucene.net, and including a true web spider, it is capable of conducting multi threaded indexing of any site, be it a DNN based site or not. The advantage of this architecture is that unlike other DNN search engine implementations, it does not rely on database access in order to index content, and therefore it does not require modules to implement ad-hoc interfaces nor to rely on SQL-Server Indexing Services to index content. Open-SearchEngine acts like google, and will look for content on your site or any site you point it to, regardless of the coding that generates a page, or the way content is stored.
Indexing content is not the only thing that Open-SearchEngine does well. Retrieving content is just as important. In order to obtain accurate search results, Open-searchEngine provides a rich query syntax, similar to the one offered by Google, that allows for partial searches, logical searches, exact phrase searches, relevance searches and much much more. The results are than ranked by relevance.
Open-SearchEngine's query execution speed is unmatched. The search engine stores and optimizes its indexes in files, and thus it does not rely on DataBase space or overhead.
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Indexing of PDF files . You can configure Open-SearchEngine to index PDF files. Once indexed, the content of the PDF will be searchable. This functionality does require one extra step, which is to download and copy three files from our site to your server.
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Indexing of Office Documents. You can configure Open-SearchEngine to index a number of Microsoft Office documents such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
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DNN and NON-DNN sites . There are no restrictions to the types of sites that can be indexed. Open-SearchEngine is a true web-spider. Just point it to a URL or to a number of URLs, and it will start indexing its content.
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Configurable Search Scope. Every search result module can be configured to limit the search results to only some of the sites that the spider has indexed. This is helpful in case you have different searches in different pages on your site, and only want to show results from specific sites.
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Configurable Search Impersonation. When spidering your own DNN portal or child portals, you can impersonate a role other than the anonymous user. This will allow you to index content that was not previously accessible to the spider. All the pages available to a user in the role you selected, will be indexed by the spider. Search results can also be setup so that content return is in accordance to user viewing rights* (*see the owner's manual for details and limitations)
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Intranets that require Windows Authentication . Each site that you want to index can be configured with its own set of credentials, so that the spider may access the site as an authorized user.
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Compliance with META directives. We have added meta tags compliance, so as to follow the directives of "no index", "no follow" that can be found on some web pages. This way, if these directives are present, the page will either not be indexed and/or it's links not be followed nor spidered.
- Go straight to the source . Open-SearchEngine can also be pointed directly to a directory, with no need to use its spideriing capabilities. You can select any directory in a Portal or Sub-Portal installation*, and index its documents or html content directly. (*see the owner's manual for details)
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Search Input, and Results Box . The search input box can be configured in various display modes, as can the search results box.
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Search Input implemented as a Skin Object. You can include the search input box directly into your skin as a Skin Object, so that it will appear on every page on your site, with no need to add it as a module. The Skin Object is configurable to display results in a specific page or in an anonymous module.
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Click Enter and Search . If you have just entered a search criteria in the Search Input bos, then just by clicking on the Enter key, you will see the search results. We have added ClientAPI code to give focus to the execute search button/image automatically (in both Search Module and Skin Object).
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Automatic exclusion of non searchable Items. There are some file types that should not be spidered even though they are referenced by a link. These file types are images, style sheets etc... We have automatically excluded these file types. You keep having the option to add your own.
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Automatic exclusion of anonymous modules. This is a DNN specific feature that was added. Pages such as Privacy, Terms, Login and Register, are in reality modules that load in the same page where the user is referencing them from. This means that from DNN, you can access the same content from different URLs. This caused searches for terms such as "terms" that appear in the Terms page, to appear listed as many times as there were pages on your site. With this new version, they will only appear once.
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All styles can be changed through the module.css style sheet found in the module’s specific directories.
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All text can be localized through the .resx files found in the App_LocalResources directories in the module’s specific directories
Credits
Thanks to all the volunteer Beta Testers that dedicated their time to make this a better product.
A special thanks to
Allan Yan of Xelleration www.xelleration.com for his invaluable help and dedication in fine tuning and trouble-shooting Windows Authentication and the ADSI access provider.
Laurence Neville for providing exceptional bug spotting abilities as well as feedback and ideas on how to improve the software.
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The following are visual examples of the modules.
Fig 1. This is a snapshot of Open-SearchEngine in action. You can see the input and the results module. At the top right corner, you can also see the input skin object. the display options of all three modules can be modified through the settings and/or through the style-sheets.
Fig 2. shows the search engine administration module that will allow to configure every aspect of Open-SearchEngine. This administration is divided into four tabs, each specific to a group of functionalities.
Fig 3. is just to show that Open-SearchEngine's administration module will automatically be reacheable through the Host menu, upon installation.
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