Thanks to Herman for this contribution. I have patched it into the current CVS 
tree and added some documentation to both the CHANGES file and the SWISH_SEARCH 
file.

I had to apply the patches by hand since the changes were made against 2.4.0, so 
it would be excellent if folks would checkout the CVS 2.5.4 branch or grab a 
recent snapshot from http://swish-e.org/devel/daily.html and test out these two 
new features: the ? wildcard and the near (proximity) keyword.

Thanks, Herman!

cheers,
pek

Herman Knoops scribbled on 5/12/06 9:06 AM:
> Hi,
> 
> We use Swish-e now for a couple of years in several 
> environments on a Windows platform (CD-ROM / Intranet).
> It's a very fast, flexible and stable search engine.
> 
> In short, some years ago we had to make a special kind
> of proximity search ("area search"). The search engine
> we used at that time could not provide that functionality.
> After investigating all kind of alternatives, we decided to
> use Swish-e as the foundation and enhanced it with a
> number of features (some of them were already requested
> by other Swish-e users, as you can see in Swish-e history).
> We've added some required features:
> - wildcard support for "?" (exactly one character)
> - proximity search support with variable distance
>   (e.g. bike near50 car)
> 
> We've also modified SwishCtl.dll (Windows) slightly to:
> - let it work in an ASP-environment on IIS (4.0 or higher);
> - let it run smoothly from CD/DVD, without msgboxes
>   and without registry access
> - removed several dependencies (zlib.dll and atl.dll),
>   so now just SwishCtl is sufficient, for a search-only
>   solution
> 
> For those who would like to enhance their Swish-e with 
> some of the mentioned features, feel free to have a look 
> at a background article, which explains things in more
> detail and has some links to download binaries and/or
> source code.
> 
> http://www.knoman.com/public/Swish-e_on_Windows.pdf
> 
> Maybe some of the patches/modifications are worthwhile
> to incorporate into the overall platform independent
> source code of Swish-e? For Swish-e people (developers
> and/or users to judge).
> 
> Just to let you know.
> Herman Knoops
> 
> 

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