Microsoft Corporation
Microsoft® Index Server is a full-text indexing and search engine for Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) and Microsoft Windows NT® Server. It allows any Web browser to search documents for key words, phrases, or properties such as an author's name.
Index Server is designed for use on a single Web server on an intranet or the Internet. It can easily handle large numbers of queries on a busy site. Automatic updating and support for Microsoft Office documents is ideal for an intranet where files change frequently.
Index Server requires IIS 2.0 and Windows NT Server 4.0 or Windows NT Workstation 4.0 and Peer Web Services.
Index Server is a component of IIS 3.0, which is a free, downloadable, and integrated feature of Windows NT Server 4.0.
Index Server 1.1 is available as part of IIS 3.0. It is also available separately by downloading it from the Microsoft Web site.
Index Server is capable of indexing textual information in any document type through content filters. Filters are provided for Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), text, and Microsoft Office documents.
Application developers can provide support for any other document by writing to the open IFilter interface. An IFilter knows how to read a file and extract the text. This text can then be indexed.
Yes. Index Server can search for the both the author tag in Microsoft Office documents and the author meta tag in HTML files.
Yes. Index Server understands all Microsoft Office properties such as author, title, subject, summary, keywords, and any custom fields. These properties are also known as OLE document properties.
For example, a user could search a server for all the documents he or she wrote if the location of a document has been forgotten. Similarly, a user who knew the author of a paper, but not its title, could search for papers written by that author.
Yes. Index Server can search all HTML meta tags such as <meta name="AUTHOR" content="author name">. Properties of the same name, such as author, are searched across both HTML and Microsoft Office documents.
Index Server is limited to indexing a single machine; however, a single Internet Information Server can host many Web sites. For example, an Internet Service Provider can provide Index Server to every host on their IIS server.
No. Index Server works directly with the file system.
If the Web site is stored on a New Technology File System (NTFS) volume, the system respects all security restrictions, and access control list (ACL) checking is performed. Users can never see a document reference in a result set if the ACL on that file prohibits their reading it. This is unlike other search engines that show users hits to all documents that meet their search, even if the user can't read the document.
Index Server can index any directory defined as a virtual root. For applications such as a central company search server or an Internet Service Provider, Index Server can be set up to work with a central index, but point to files on other servers.
Index Server allows query restrictions to be built by combining a number of "tests." Query restrictions available for use in any combination include:
Index Server provides fuzzy query support, where the system can generate words that are similar to the ones the user enters. The system supports simple MS-DOS®–like wildcards and UNIX-like regular expression matching against textual properties. Content queries support simple prefix matching. For example, typing in the word "dog*" will return "dogmatic" and "doghouse".
The system also provides linguistic stemming support that matches the various tenses of query words. So the word "swim" will expand to include "swimming," "swam," "swum," and other related words—this process is called inflection. Index Server performs this linguistic analysis of the words that are entered, as well as the reverse operation, called stemming. Fuzzy queries and stemming are available in all supported languages.
Yes. The results page is a standard HTML file, with a few custom extensions. It can be customized by the Webmaster, and users can be given choices such as what fields to show, how to sort, and the number of hits to return per page.
In addition to returning properties stored with the document, the system can generate document "abstracts" that may also be returned in a result set. An abstract is simply a document summary that gives the user some idea of what a particular document is about. The document abstract can also be part of a query restriction.
Microsoft Internet Information Server already logs all traffic moving between the client and server. Standard IIS logging picks up query information such as the querying IP address and the queries posted to the server, so Index Server doesn't need to log queries itself. Errors and other informational events are also logged in the Windows NT system and application logs.
Index Server includes a full set of counters for the Windows NT Server performance monitor. Both the content index engine and the search engine can be monitored. In addition, the HTML administration pages provide access to the current status of the indexing engine.
Index Server is an integrated service of Windows NT Server. It was designed to leverage the operating system, which allows for features like automatic indexing and high performance. Index Server also respects file system security and only shows hits to documents that the user has permission to view. In addition to the HTML and text support in Enterprise Server, Index Server also indexes Microsoft Office files, with support for seven languages.
Index Server provides much of the functionality of Netscape Catalog Server, but on a single machine. The Microsoft Information Retrieval Server is recommended for customers who require indexing and searching across many distributed servers.
Wide Area Information Server (WAIS) was commonly used in the early days of the Web to provide searching capabilities for Web sites. WAIS is no longer a commercial product, and does not have the speed, extensibility, integration, and support of Index Server on Windows NT Server.