OpenFTS 0.3.2 is now available for download at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/openfts.
OpenFTS (Open Source Full Text Search engine) is an advanced
PostgreSQL-based search engine that provides online indexing of data and
relevance ranking for database searching. Close integration with
database allows use of metadata to restrict search results.
The tcl version (a perl version is also available) can be built to work
with tclsh or it can be built as a loadable module for Aolserver (see
http://www.aolserver.com). Also, package support for OpenFTS has been
built into Openacs (see http://openacs.org) to provide a highly
integrated search solution.
OpenFTS has the following features:
* Very fast index updates: No need for re-building the whole index on
every submission to the indexer.
* Proximity: Ranking results with respect to how close the keywords were
found in a document. So if you have a document which includes the phrase
"full text search" and another document which includes the words "full",
"text", "search", the first one will be ranked higher.
* Weighting scheme: Configurable weights for words in title and body. By
default, words in title weight more than words in the body of the
document. So, documents that contain the search query in the title are
ranked higher than those that contain it in the body..
* Stemming: It allows to find same words with different endings. For
example, if words "testing" or "tests" are found in a document, the word
"test" will be stored by indexer instead. Search will also try to find
the word "test" if "testing" or "tests" is given in search query. Note
that this scheme lacks exact search possibility, but usually reduces
database size and makes search faster.
* Stopwords: Ignores common words and characters (known as stopwords) as
they tend to slow down searches without improving the quality of the
results. Terms such as "where" and "how", as well as certain single
digits and single letters, are not included in searches.
* Modular architecture: Makes it easy to add parsers and dictionaries.
Snowball Stemmer dictionary support has been added for the following
languages: Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, German, Italian, Norwegian,
Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish. Other Snowball stemmer
dictionaries can also be easily added as they become available. In
addition, Ispell dictionay support is also available. This allows for
easy integration of multilingual search capablities.
* Multilingual support: Latin and Cyrillic are available. Others can be
added.
* Search terms in context: Displays excerpt from the documents, which
shows how your search terms are used in context on that document. Your
search terms are bolded so you can tell at a glance whether the result
is a document you want to view.
For more information, see http://openfts.sf.net/