On Sun, 15 Mar 1998 eugene_semetsky@aapl.com.au wrote:

> Check out the free web server search utility offered by Excite at:
> 
> www.excite.com/navigate
> 
> It is absolutely superb! Much more powerful than Swish, basic to configure,
> generates search and results pages automatically, supports indexing with
> regular expressions...it really is excellent.

	No, actually it sucks as I stated a few messages back.  The
	*only* things it's got going for it is that it does stemming
	and gives context.  (I personally dislike stemming.)  Stemming
	is a very expensive thing to do.  For exactly the same data,
	running Excite's indexer takes about 12 hours to run on a Sparc
	20; running SWISH++ takes about 20 minutes.

	It is *not* simple to configure: if you want to do any
	customization whatsoever, you have to hack at their clunky,
	bloated, Perl 4 (yes, 4!) code.  And if you want different
	hacks for different pages, you have to install it multiple
	times since every have affects an entire installation.

	And, I don't know what you think regular expressions are, but
	Excite does *not* support them.  Not even Alta Vista does.

	- Paul J. Lucas
	  NASA Ames Research Center		Caelum Research Corporation
	  Moffett Field, California		San Jose, California
	  <pjl AT ptolemy DOT arc DOT nasa DOT gov>