The Query System

How do I limit system impact of Index Server?

Index Server provides a number of registry settings to control its system resource usage. These controls allow the administrator to set the amount of RAM used by the system (both maximum and minimum), disk usage, processor utilization and so on. In addition, the administrator can raise or lower the priority of indexing and query processing.

Will Index Server support queries against non-FAT or Netware volumes?

Index Server can index any IIS virtual root. If the root points to a local or remote FAT volume or a remote Netware or Unix share, the volume will be indexed. There will be some loss of functionality however. In the case of FAT volumes, the system won't be able to provide any security checks since FAT doesn't support ACLs. If the remote FAT volume is hosted by a Windows NT machine, the system will use change notification for update. If the remote FAT volume isn't hosted by Windows NT, the system will be forced to periodically scan the volume for changes.

Remote Netware and Unix shares can be indexed; however, there is no security checking. Netware volumes must be periodically re-scanned to detect changes.

Does Index Server deliver fuzzy logic queries?

The query system allows users to post queries using the traditional DOS wildcards ("*" and "?") and also a variation of the UNIX Grep language. The query system also allows the user to generate grammatically correct variations of words to broaden queries (e.g. "swim" can be automatically expanded to include "swim", "swam", "swum".

Users can also vary the weighting assigned to terms in a query. These weights are used when ranking query results for final display.

How is Index Server different from the Microsoft Normandy Information Retrieval Server?

Index Server provides indexing and querying on a single Web server at a time. The Normandy Information Retrieval Server allows large Internet content providers and intranet sites to distribute query load and search across large numbers of indexes simultaneously.

There is a rapidly expanding set of Internet queries tools now available; WAIS and Harvest, for example. How will the Index Server exploit or coexist with these rapidly growing standards?

We are still investigating how Index Server can interoperate with other query and indexing systems.