some obvious differences:

glimpse is not a GNU'd project; swish-e is.
glimpse offers paid support; swish-e does not.

on the technical merits, I can only speak for swish-e and what I read about 
glimpse. both do not support multi-byte encodings. both are written in C. both 
have lots of Perl add-ons for web interface, etc. both will probably index 
upwards of a million docs.

glimpse seems to have some grep-like search features, which sound nice. swishe-e 
uses lots of 3rd party libraries for stemming, parsing, etc. the search syntax 
is pretty simple, but seems effective for most uses (regexp support would be 
nice, but only a simple wildcard is currently supported).

swish-e is intended as one tool in a toolkit, not a complete solution. It 
appears to be that glimpse/webglimpse attempts to be a complete solution.

if by CAPI you mean the ISDN programming interface, swish-e doesn't do that. If 
you mean 'Computer Assisted Personal Interviewing' it doesn't do that either. If 
you mean C API, as in the C language Application Programming Interface, swish-e 
has one. Read about it at the website: http://swish-e.org/docs/swish-library.html

If you're dealing with email, you probably want a combination of search and 
email-specific parsing. I think swish-e has examples of using it with hypermail, 
etc. -- someone else on the list can probably speak to that specifically.


John Paige scribbled on 5/5/05 10:38 AM:
> Hi,
>    I am looking for an indexer/searching tool to index/serach our
> email messages. I am not able to decide between glimpse and Swish-e.
> Any recommendations?
> Also, how is CAPI support in Swish-e?
> 
> Thanks,
> John

-- 
Peter Karman  .  http://peknet.com/  .  peter(at)not-real.peknet.com