P@noptic 5.1.0 release notes

Released: 20 Apr 2004

Prior to v6.0 Funnelback was known as P@noptic Search

Panoptic V5.1 addresses a significantly larger enterprise search market. It is now available in Solaris and Windows versions as well as Linux and supports indexing of databases (Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL and Ingres). Panoptic 5 also provides even easier customization, even easier integration with other systems, even higher quality results and even more search features.

Broader applicability

  • Red Hat Linux, Windows 2000/XP/Server 2003 and Solaris versions.

  • Database indexing - Oracle, MS SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL and Ingres.

  • Crawling of HTTPS sites.

  • Crawler support for cookies and session-id stripping allows even better crawling of dynamically generated websites.

  • Highly customizable structured search of XML formats.

  • Highly customizable metadata configuration. Netscape, Dublin Core, AGLS and user-defined metadata schemes.

  • Support for media formats such as JPEG and CMML (See the Continuous Media Web site).

  • A new highly customizable featured pages mechanism.

  • Support for alternate single-byte character sets such as ISO-8859-2, Windows-1251 and koi8-r allow search of languages such as Russian, Polish, Norwegian, and Greek. Character set mappings are customer-definable if an existing mapping isn’t available.

  • Accent conflation - an unaccented query word will match all the accented variants. For example, chateau will match château. (This feature can be disabled if not required but allows searchers with simple keyboards to conveniently search for foreign language text.)

  • Improved documentation on integrating Panoptic with other systems.

  • Even higher quality ranking of search results:

    • Better elimination of near-duplicates.

    • New high-performance ranking algorithms based on new CSIRO research.

    • Configurable down-weighting of results from the same "site"

    • Links are redirected to ensure proper targeting and counting of link information

  • W3C double-A accessibility compliance for search pages.

  • A full range of query refinement options, including search within results, stemming, spelling suggestions, sounds-like and customizable thesauri.

  • Improved summaries including punctuation.

  • Choice of summary formats. snippet, metadata, query-biased and combination modes selectable on a per-query basis. Summary length also controllable for individual queries.

  • Much greater control of "relevance" scoring. (If you’re sure you can do better than the defaults!). For example, you can select a group of metadata classes which you wish to be upweighted.