Venexus DotNetNuke Blog - DotNetNuke Search

Differences Between DNN Search Engines

Jeff Smith — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 23:37:38 GMT

I have been asked to compare the differences between our search engine and Open-SearchEngine. I agree this is an important question that needs to be answered, so I decided to put together a comparison between the core DNN Search, Open-SearchEngine, and Venexus Search Engine. While my opinion of which is the best, is defintely biased toward our own product, I have tried to provide an in-depth look at the basics of how each search engine works, a feature matrix, and simple search results analysis. Without further ado, read on...

DotNetNuke Search (core project)

DNN Search is part of the DNN core that is installed and configured out of the box.

DotNetNuke Search consists of 4 main pieces:

Scheduled Task

The scheduled task initiates the process of indexing the modules, at the scheduled time interval. An iteration of all modules that support iSearchable is performed. During this process, text that is extracted from the module is cleaned, parsed, and added to search word and search items tables.

Search Admin

The search admin is for setting the maximum word length, minimum word length, option to include common words, and the option to include numbers.

Search Input Module

A module or skin object can be used to provide the form for the search query. In module settings, you can use the default button, or an image. You do not have the option to change this image within the module, nor change the text. Styles can be used to make some look and feel changes, but it is limited. When a search is performed, the user is redirected to the Search Results page.

Search Results Module

This module provides the search results. In the settings, you can set the maximum search results, results per page, maximum title length, maximum description length, and the option to show description. Results are limited to the exact word queried.

Oddly enough, there no longer appears to be a DNN forum for search, or a blog dedicated to it on the DotNetNuke website. However, a good place to find out more about the core module is ecktwo’s site. There is a lot of information about how all the pieces work together, as well as the bugs/issues of DotNetNuke Search. There is also a tutorial and report on DNN Search for DNN 4.

Open-SearchEngine

Open-SearchEngine is developed by Xepient Solutions. The package is capable of indexing HTML content as well as PDF’s and several Office documents. Open-SearchEngine uses Lucene.Net, a port of the Java Lucene Search Engine, for indexing and querying.

Open-Search Engine consists of 4 main pieces:

Scheduled Task

Test The scheduled task initiates the process of spidering, at the scheduled time interval. Lucene.Net handles indexing of the data.

Search Engine Admin Module

This module provides an interface for configuring the search engine to your preferences. You can add a starting URL and by default, spidering is enabled. This allows you to offer multiple sites in your search engine. However, unless disabled, each time you run the process to update the index, all URLs are re-crawled. With many URLs on the site(s) you index, it can lead to a very long time between the completion of crawling and indexing runs.

Search Input Module

A module or skin object can be used to provide the form for the search query. In module settings, you can use the default button, or an image. You also have the option to add “Search” as text or image before the textbox.

Search Results Module

This module provides the search results. In the settings, you can set which sites are part of the results scope, maximum results per page, maximum title length, title link target, and the option to hide description.

Venexus Search Engine

The Venexus Search Engine is quite different than the other 2 solutions. The package includes 2 modules and requires MS SQL Server Full-Text Indexing. Like traditional crawlers, VSE can crawl and index a variety of data, but where the real difference is seen is in it's ability to also “crawl” and index RSS feeds. This is the key to keeping the search results up-to-date, while conserving server and bandwidth resources. Rather than recrawling and reindexing all content, "smart caching" is used to determine when RSS feeds need to be aggregated, and when non-syndicated content needs to be recrawled on the site.

The Venexus Search Engine consists of 2 main pieces:

Seamus Module

The Seamus module is the “search engine aggregation module utilizing syndication”. On the first load of the module, Seamus iterates through the core DNN modules on all portals that support the iPortable interface. Seamus uses this “initial dump” to gather other URLs for the site. You also have the ability to add feeds to Seamus, not only for your site, but any external site. With “global crawler” enabled, any external site URLs that are discovered during crawling, are added to the queue as well. Using AJAX, Seamus performs crawling of 3 feeds and 3 URLs with each load. If the user remains on the page, using AJAX, Seamus will continue to crawl and save the data to the table for indexing. This decreases the load on the server by spreading the crawling and indexing across several user sessions, rather than a single scheduled task.

Search Module

The Search module provides the search box, as well as the results. Using Microsoft SQL Server’s feature of Full-Text Indexing, data is indexed from the crawling and storing provided by Seamus. Within the settings you can specify the search button text or use you own custom image for the button, set maximum search length, set search bx size, maximum results, results per page, set maximum length of display URL, specify remote connection string (database other than DNN), specify portal specific search, or allow user to select between site or all of the web search.

Feature Comparison Matrix:

Below you will find a list of features for DNN Search, Open-SearchEngine, Venexus Search Engine Standard, and Venexus Search Engine PRO.

Feature	DNN Search	Open-SearchEngine	Venexus Search Engine Standard	Venexus Search Engine PRO
Crawling Method	Module Indexer (Must implement iSearchable)	Custom URL crawler/spider (Must have starting URL for each site, with crawling enabled)	Custom Crawler (Uses iPortable interface, traditional URL crawler/spider, and RSS aggregation)	Custom Crawler (Uses iPortable interface, traditional URL crawler/spider, and RSS aggregation)
Crawl and Index Start	Requires DNN Scheduled Task	Requires DNN Scheduled Task	User Interactive (AJAX in aggregation module)	User Interactive (AJAX in aggregation module)
Global Crawler	No	No (Requires input of each domain)	No	Yes
DNN User Impersonation	No	Yes	No	No (Version 2.0)
Windows Authentication	No	Yes	No	No (Version 2.0)
Exclude List	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Excel Documents	No	Yes	No	Yes
PDF Files	No	Yes	No	Yes
PowerPoints	No	Yes	No	Yes
RTF Files	No	No	No	Yes
Word Docs	No	Yes	No	Yes
Index File System	No	Yes	No	No (Version 2.0)
Index	Table Driven Index	Lucene.Net (flat file)	Full-Text Indexing in SQL Server (flat file)	Full-Text Indexing in SQL Server (flat file)
RSS	No	No	No	Yes
Enclosure Support (podcast/vodcast)	No	No	No	Yes
Feed Discovery	No	No	Yes	Yes
Smart Caching	No	No	Yes	Yes
Allow users to add feeds	No	No	No	Yes
Generates RSS Feed of latest items indexed	No	No	Yes	Yes
Blog and Feed Aggregator Pinging	No	No	No	Yes
Search Skin Object	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Utilize DNN Search Skin	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
Modify search box and image	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Use Image or Text for Search button	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Portal(site) or Web search	No	No	Yes	Yes
Keyword Highlighting	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Cached Version	No	No	No	No (Version 2.0)
User Saved Searches	No	No	No	No (Version 2.0)
Social Bookmarking	No	No	No	Yes
Price	Free	$49	Free	$199

Performance and Relevancy:

What about performance and the relevancy of the results? I setup a test site with 5 total pages of content and installed/configured DNN Search, Open-SearchEngine, and Venexus Search Engine on separate pages. I also installed PageGenerated module from Ventrian Systems to show page execution time. I am not sure of any accuracy for a benchmark here, but the following results are the best of 5 consecutive query executions against each search engine using "truman" without quotes as the search query. In reality, there are only 2 relevant pages associated with "truman". There is a link from the home page of the site with the text "Truman Doctrine" as a contextual link that directs the user to the full document about the "Truman Doctrine". Ideally, we should expect the document that is all about "truman" and his doctrine to be listed first:

DNN Search:

Best Execution Time: 0.218531 seconds

Results Returned: 1

Notes:

The only result returned is not the most relevant page on the site. In fact, the "Truman Doctrine" page is not even listed as a result. This must be because the word "truman" does not actually appear in the content of the text/html module on the Truman Doctrine page. There is "HARRY S. TRUMAN'S ADDRESS" in the content, but DNN Search can only return results where the query is spelled EXACTLY like something in the content.

Open-SearchEngine:

Best page Execution: 0.1093155 seconds

Returned Results: 10

Notes:

Notice the poor description and the fact that the true most relevant document (the "Truman Doctrine" page) is the 5th result. Also, there are several results of pages that have no information about "Truman" except for the link in the SolPartMenu. While it is good that the search engine is able to crawl the solpartmenu, it is unfortunate that the search engine weights pages that just have links in a menu higher than the most relevant result. The best page execution time was half that of DNN Search, which is excellent.

Venexus Search Engine:

Best Page Execution: 0.046866 seconds

Results Returned: 3

Notes:

Notice the first result is the actual document (the "Truman Doctrine" page) we are looking for. Also, page execution time is less than half the time than Open-SearchEngine and a quarter of the time compared to DNN Search.

Conclusion:

The implementation provided by the DNN core team for the built-in DotNetNuke Search suits the needs for many smaller sites. However, larger sites will quickly run into issues with memory consumption due to the way the module indexing is performed. The search architecture is limited and greatly impacts the performance of the site and the search results due to the indexing process and the direct SQL table queries that holds the words and index. Most likely this is due to the requirement for database independence, rather than poor design. If your site is small, needs database independence, and search results are helpful, but not really an important piece of your site, then this may be the best tool for you.

If you are looking for a traditional search engine crawler, with good scalability, and you require database server independence, and decent search results, Open-SearchEngine may be the solution for you. It is by far better than the core DNN Search, but relies on tradional crawling and indexing methods. Conservation of bandwidth and server resources are debatable since there is no method of smart caching available. The ability for this engine to index direcories of files is an important feature than neither DNN Search, nor VSE offer. However, the lack of RSS aggregation as the new medium for crawling and gathering new and updated data is a huge issue that will lead to stagnant search results without frequently reindexing all URLs. As evident from the simple search results analysis performed, most results are not really relevant, but it is better than not returning any true relevant results like DNN Search due to spelling differences. It just means your users will have plenty to click on before finding the correct document they are looking for. While execution time is certainly better than DNN Search, it is still significantly slower than the Venexus Search Engine execution time.

The Venexus Search Engine offers 2 versions, the standard (free version), and the Pro (not free version). The standard version still offers many of the features smaller sites require, including quick and relevant results, but does not include some of the nicer features of the Pro version like PDF and MS Office document indexing and blog and feed aggregation pinging service. Where VSE really shines is in its ability to provide and aggregate RSS feeds for inclusion in its index. The smart caching and user interactive crawling using AJAX distributes the load on the server and bandwidth. The major advantage and disadvantage of VSE is MS SQL Server Full-Text indexing. The disadvantage is that VSE is NOT database independant and requires Full-Text indexing enabled versions of MS SQL Server in order to operate. The advantage is that it uses Full-Text Indexing from MS SQL Server for more relevant and faster search results. We know VSE is scalable because it has been tested against a database of over 2 million indexed pages. The simple search results analysis shows that it is 4 times faster than DNN Search and 2 times faster than Open-SearchEngine. The actual search results speak for themselves, delivering the most relevant result as #1 and contextual links from the home page as supplemental results.

Picking the right search engine application is important for your website and now you should be armed with the knowledge of how each one operates, the differences in features between them, and the overall performance and relevancy of the search results.

I hope this answers everyone's questions concerning the differences between the 3 DotNetNuke Search Engines. Feel free to comment with questions or suggestion on how this post can be improved. If you know of a feature or difference that I missed, please let me know. While this post is quite lengthy, I plan on keeping it updated as a resource for those who would like to keep track of the differences between each DNN search engine.

The Power of Blog and Feed Aggregator Pinging for SEO Benefits

Jeff Smith — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 21:54:46 GMT

We did a search engine optimization (SEO) campaign for a client a while back that required us to setup a few new domains with blogging software. We used a variety of different blogging software and noticed something very interesting...sites that performed pinging were crawled within 1-3 days and indexed within 2 weeks. All of the domains we used were brand new. In some cases, keywords that we were focusing on were in top 10 search results in 2 weeks as well. Needless to say, the client was happy.

So, we added a pinging feature as part of our DotNetNuke search engine module. Seamus, our search engine aggregation module, generates a RSS feed for the entire DNN portal. Anytime a tab/page is added or updated and Seamus finds this change, if the "Pinging Service" is enabled, it will ping 14 different blog and feed aggregation services.

So you are probably asking how does this work. Well, we send a "ping" to these aggregation services using XML-RPC. It simply tells these services that there is new content available on your site and to check the RSS feed. These services then will consume the feed and add it to their index. This provides a contextual link (assuming you actually use good titles for your pages) from these service sites directly to the content on your site. Pretty cool, huh?

Currently the following services are pinged with our module:

BlogDigger.com
BlogFlux.com
Blogsearch.Google.com
BlogRolling.com
Bulkfeeds.net
Feedburner.com
Feedster.com
IceRocket.com
Pingomatic.com
Syndic8.com
Technorati.com
My.Yahoo.com
Weblogs.com
Weblogalot.com

As a test, we dropped our search engine module on a new domain on 3/16/2007. With no links from external sites pointing to this domain, most if not all of the traffic was from our development at this point, averaging about 3-5 unique visitors a day (probably me, the client, and one or more of our developers). As of yesterday, the site had almost 150 unique visitors. Not bad for 2 weeks, considering we have done nothing else to this site other than add 10 total pages of content. This site is off to a great start and we have not even started a linking or submission campaign. See the graph below:

Also, checkout the following post on Marketing Pilgrim about faster indexing through pinging Google blog search that collaborates our results.

Ready to see the power of pinging blog and feed aggregators? Add a pinging service to your DNN site and watch the traffic roll in.

VSE 1.2.1 Patch - a DNN Search Module

Jeff Smith — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 02:32:08 GMT

We issues a patch release today for the Venexus Search Engine, a DotNetNuke search engine module. This release has a few minor bug fixes and tweaks:

Catalog creation in SQLDataProvider file moved to Search module (you still have to run the VenexusSearch module SQLDataProvider file through Host > SQL during new installation, but not for those who are upgrading).
Queue Importance added to allow some URLs to be crawled sooner than others. If you are running a global search engine, we now give preference to certain domain extentions (.gov and .edu).
Stores single Robots.txt file for domain instead of historical. Previously we stored a new robots.txt for each weekly check if it was updated. Now we only store one.
Feed Title is now the portal/site name.
Added XML-RPC ping for BlogFlux inclusion in our blog/feed aggregator pinging service. We had to remove one aggregator and added BlogFlux to the list (14 total)

Get the free version of our DNN search module.

VSE 1.2 Release - A DNN Search Engine Module

Jeff Smith — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 16:25:17 GMT

We released the latest version of our search engine module last week. It has all of the features I mentioned in my previous post, plus the ability to add excluded URLs and partial URLs.

Here are the new specs:

Items marked with * are new

Features	Standard Version	Pro Version
Seamus Features
Maximum # of Pages	500	Unlimited
Install on commercial site	No	Yes
Scheduled Index Updates	Yes	Yes
Announcements Module Support	Yes	Yes
Contacts Module Support	Yes	Yes
Events Module Support	Yes	Yes
FAQ Module Support	Yes	Yes
Links Module Support	Yes	Yes
Text/HTML Module Support	Yes	Yes
Index MS Excel Documents *	No	Yes
Index MS PowerPoint Documents *	No	Yes
Index MS Word Documents *	No	Yes
Index PDF Documents *	No	Yes
Index Rich Text Files *	No	Yes
Global Crawler *	No	Yes
Allows users to add feeds	No	Yes
Custom User Agent	No	Yes
Obeys Robots.txt	Yes	Yes
TTL Support	Yes	Yes
Feed and Queue Aggregation Using AJAX	Yes	Yes
Display Top X Latest Items	Yes	Yes
XSLT Support	Yes	Yes
Latest Items RSS Feed Generation	Yes	Yes
Portal Specific Feed	Yes	Yes
Enclosure/Podcast Support	No	Yes
Pinging Service	No	Yes
Exclude URLs *	Yes	Yes

Search Features
Search Skin Object	Yes	Yes
Use Image or Text for Search button	Yes	Yes
and - (AND and OR) Support	Yes	Yes
Quoted Search Support	Yes	Yes
Keyword Highlighting	Yes	Yes
Obeys DNN Security	Yes	Yes
Social Bookmarking Support *	No	Yes

Support
Issue Tracker	Yes	Yes
Email	No	Yes
Phone	No	1 Call
Price	Free	$199 Per Year

You can download the free version here.

Pro Version Features of Our DNN Search Engine Modules

Jeff Smith — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 10:04:36 GMT

The Venexus Search Engine is a DotNetNuke search module, plus a whole lot more. Not only does our DNN search module index your portal, but also external sites. VSE crawls pages on your site, aggregates RSS feeds from other sites, and crawls any links for external websites, making it a full search engine module. Unlike the core DNN Search module that uses a scheduled task to perform index updates, VSE crawls and indexes content based on user request. Seamus can be configured for several different setups and displays, including the ability to hide the module on every page. When a page is loaded that has the Seamus module on it, Seamus will go out and grab 3 RSS feeds and 3 queued URLs and add any new or updated content to the index. In order to not delay the page loading for the end user, Seamus utilizes AJAX to make aggregation request, providing a seamless integration into your site.

Here are the pro features of VSE:

1.1 Pro Features

Allow users to add their feeds

You can enable users to add feeds to the system.

Podcast Support

Indexed items that have files associated with them are used as enclosures (aka podcast) in the feeds that Seamus generates.

Pinging service

When the pinging service is enabled, every time something new is added/updated on your site Seamus will “ping” several XML-RPC web services for blog and feed aggregation sites to notify them your portal has new content. The aggregators will then come to your site and aggregate your feed and provide links to their users to your site.

Here are a few services we ping:

Custom User-Agent

You can set your own user-agent to specify your own crawler name. The default user-agent is “Seamus/1.1 PRO ( http://search.venexus.com)”.

Global Crawler

The pro version allows you to be a global crawler. Any links found on your site, from aggregated news feeds, or from external links are crawled and indexed.

So, not only are you able to aggregate even more content with the Pro version when compared to the Standard version, but you also get the search engine optimization benefits of pinging all of the major blog and feed aggregation services. This provides you with links directly to your site, generating more web traffic. You can watch your page rank grow very quickly with this feature.

Since the release of the 1.1 version, we have steadily been working on the 1.2 version. We are now testing the latest version on our demo site: search.venexus.com.

1.2 Pro Features (March 1, 2007 Release)

New file formats indexed

You asked for it, so we added support for all of the most common Office document file types as well as PDF documents. We have added a new document-to-text converter to our crawler that is able to parse the actual text from these documents. So not only does Seamus crawl and index HTML, Text, and XML files, but also the following new formats:

1. Excel files

2. PDF files

3. PowerPoint files

4. Rich text files

5. Word documents

Social Bookmarking Support

In the search results you can enable social bookmarking to allow users to easily add bookmarks to their favorite social bookmarking application/service. This allows user to easily find their favorite links to your site. Also, the sites that provide this service will generate a link to your site, giving you more traffic once again.

Here is an example of what it looks like:

Here are the supported sites:

1. Digg

2. del.icio.us

3. FURL

4. Reddit

5. Yahoo

6. Blinklist

7. Google

8. ma.gnolia

9. Shadows

10. Technorati

Ready for a real search engine for your site? Buy the Pro version here.

Stay tuned for more…

Venexus Search Engine 1.1 Pro Version Released

Jeff Smith — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 19:52:51 GMT

We released the Pro version of our DNN search engine module today.

Here is the breakdown of the feature comparison:

Venexus Search Engine Version Matrix

Features	Standard Version	Pro Version
Seamus Features>
Maximum # of Pages>	500	Unlimited
Install on commercial site>	No	Yes
Scheduled Index Updates>	Yes	Yes
Announcements Module Support>	Yes	Yes
Contacts Module Support>	Yes	Yes
Events Module Support>	Yes	Yes
FAQ Module Support>	Yes	Yes
Links Module Support>	Yes	Yes
Text/HTML Module Support>	Yes	Yes
Allows users to add feeds>	No	Yes
Custom User Agent>	No	Yes
Obeys Robots.txt>	Yes	Yes
TTL Support>	Yes	Yes
Feed Aggregation Using AJAX>	Yes	Yes
Display Top X Latest Items>	Yes	Yes
XSLT Support>	Yes	Yes
Latest Items RSS Feed Generation>	Yes	Yes
Portal Specific Feed>	Yes	Yes
Enclosure/Podcast Support>	No	Yes
Pinging Service>	No	Yes
>
Search Features>
Search Skin Object>	Yes	Yes
Use Image or Text for Search button>	Yes	Yes
+ and - (AND and OR) Support>	Yes	Yes
Quoted Search Support>	Yes	Yes
Keyword Highlighting>	Yes	Yes
Obeys DNN Security>	Yes	Yes
>
Support>
Issue Tracker>	Yes	Yes
Email>	No	Yes
Phone >	No	1 Call
>
Price>	Free	$199 Per Year

I will be discussing the features of the Pro version in a later post. Stay tuned...>

Venexus Search Engine 1.1 Standard

Jeff Smith — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 22:17:05 GMT

We have released the new version of the Venexus Search Engine. VSE Standard Version 1.1.0 has several bug fixes and shows some of the new features of the Pro version.

New standard features and bug fixes:

VenexusSeamus - Changed TransformXSL to not create a temporary XML file
VenexusSeamus - Modified Response.Charset
VenexusSeamus - New Delete Tabs routine for removing deleted and expired tabs
VenexusSeamus - Ability to reload default XSLT file
VenexusSeamus - Shows total number of aggregated items
VenexusSeamus - Gridview pagination
VenexusSeamus - Link from Grid to show aggregation errors
VenexusSeamus - Guid attribute added
VenexusSeamus - application/rss+xml support
VenexusSeamus - Automatic creation of fulltext index during installation (works for SQL Server Express too!)
VenexusSearch - Support for DNN 4.4.1 and "search" URL parameter
VenexusSearch - Non-authenticated postback issue resolved
VenexusSearch - Limits URL length for display
VenexusSearch - Quoted query support

If you have any issues with installation, configuration, or bugs, pleas post them in our issue tracker.

SQL Server 2005 Express and Full-Text Indexing

Jeff Smith — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 07:25:21 GMT

Here is a video tutorial on setting up SQL Server 2005 Express and Full-Text Indexing. It breaks down the steps for installation of SQL Server Express with Advanced Services. This is a great video that shows alot more than just setting up full-text indexing. It also shows some basic queries.

Key points of interest during installation is when you get to the Registration Information screen, uncheck "Hide advanced configuration options" before clicking Next. Then in the next screen, expand Database Services and select the option to add "entire feature will be installed on local hard drive" for Full-Text Search. After a few more steps, you must uncheck User Instances Enabled. For those who already have Full-Text Search installed, but did not uncheck that option, you can use the following SQL:

sp_configure 'user instances enabled', '0'

If you are using SQL Server Express Management Studio Express, you can go into the database properties and under files, make sure enable full-text indexing is checked. Or, run the following SQL:

sp_fulltext_database 'enable'>

Now for creating the catalog and index. The example below is for our search engine module:>

Create fulltext catalog VenexusSearchCatalog>

Create Unique Index PKVenexusSearchEngine On Venexus_BrainDump(IndexID)

Create fulltext index On Venexus_BrainDump (IndexURL, IndexTitle, IndexWashedContent)
Key Index PKVenexusSearchEngine On VenexusSearchCatalog
With Change_Tracking Auto

Legal Search Engine Using Venexus Search Engine Modules

Jeff Smith — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 14:44:34 GMT

The first beta testers of the Venexus Search Engine were the guys from True Lawyers. They created a new portal in their DNN installation for Search.TrueLawyers.com. Search.TrueLawyers.com is a legal search engine. Their instance of VSE has aggregated over 216,000 legal articles, news, and related site pages as of this morning. You can test this site and see that the speed of VSE is still great when considering the amount of data it has already indexed. When using the site, each time a page is loaded that has Seamus on it (and Seamus CAN be hidden on the page), 5 feeds are aggregated. Any new items in the feeds are added to the index immediately. While the user sits on the page, AJAX is used to pull more feeds. Plus, since the site is new and does not have much traffic...yet, they use a RSS reader to call the Seamus RSS feed, which grabs more data every 10 to 15 minutes. As you can imagine, their index is growing FAST! You can see the latest items Seamus has aggregated by visiting the True Lawyers Legal News Room.

So, not only does VSE work as a site search engine and multiple portal search engine, it also works as a full blown search engine, aggregating items from your DNN installation, as well as other sites that provides RSS feeds. One of the features we are working on for the 1.1 Pro version is the ability to index any website, regardless of having a RSS feed. You can now have the ability to build powerful niche websites that provide your users with lots of relevant information. Plus, with the RSS feed Seamus generates, you can set it to display items for only your website, allowing you to submit the link to many feed directories, providing search engine optimization. The 1.1 Pro version will ping many blog directories, greatly increasing traffic to your website, treating your entire website like a blog. And we all know that the other search engines are just eating up blog content, increasing the page rank of those sites over many traditional websites without feeds. Ready to try it out? You can download the release candidate here.

Stay tuned for more...

UPDATE 2/7/2007:

I just checked the total items indexed for this site again and it is now showing over 246,0000 items. So in 2 weeks, an extra 30k + items were indexed.

Venexus Search Engine - Release Candidate

Jeff Smith — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 22:40:30 GMT

I know many of you have been patiently waiting for the release of the Venexus Search Engine. We have had several beta testers try out previous release candidates, and have several new tweaks in this release.

Seamus Additions:

Web.configless (No changes to web.config needed. Beta Testers should remove EntitySpaces web.config entries when installing this version)
Object Qualifier support (Thank you Barry White for testing this)
Index current tab (Seamus will index the tab it is on. You can add make Seamus invisible on the page by showing 0 items in the feed and unchecking Show Feed. Add to all pages on the site and Seamus will index and update the index when the page is updated)
Edit Feed Display (Only show feeds selected in Edit Feeds section. By default, all are show. Selecting feeds will filter news display of only items indexed from the feeds list)

Search Additions:

Web.configless
Object Qualifier support
"query" URL parameter (You can now use your existing default DNN search results page. Simply drop the module on the search results page and remove the default search results module. Utilize the DNN Search textbox in your skin with the power of Full-Text Indexing).
Search form skin object support (see instructions)
Form post fix (A fix was added that allows you to simply hit the enter key after adding your query, rather than forcing you to click on the button)
Allow user selected web or site search (allow your users to select whether their search is against the current portal or for all search results in the database)
URL Trim (Used to trim the URL display in the search results. Long URLs would stretch out the skin)
Search Query (Saves user queries and the number of "hits" for that query. This will be used in the pro version for "Top Searches" and "Latest Searches".)

Here is some information about our DotNetNuke search engine module. You can test it on our site here. We also have the latest version loaded on our DNN search site for finding DotNetNuke related pages and sites.

As for the official release, we are waiting on FlatBurger to fix an issue with their code protection that causes the module to generate an error after activation. We have been told that this may be fixed by Friday...we will see. In the meantime, please send us your thoughts on this release candidate. If you find any bugs, please post them to our issue tracker. If you have any suggestions for new features, please post them in the issue tracker or in the support forms.

REQUIREMENTS FOR VENEXUS SEARCH ENGINE

DotNetNuke 4.3.5 or Higher (Yes it works with the DNN 4.4 release)
SQL Server supporting Full-Text Indexing
.Net full trust for EntitySpaces and Reflection usage

Now for the files....

Before installing this, you MUST read the instructions. You CANNOT just install both modules and expect it to work. You MUST configure fulltext indexing manually to get this to work. You will find instructions on performing this action in the Search Instructions and Configuration.

You can download both modules here. The file is also attached as an enclosure.

Please post your links here in a comment to show everyone how you are using the Venexus Search Engine.

UPDATED: Link to module downloads has been updated.

And then there was Search...Part II

Jeff Smith — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 10:04:44 GMT

I know it has been over a week since the last post. Sorry to leave you hanging, but sometimes there are just not enough hours in a day. Anyway, without further ado, here is part two…SEAMUS.

At some point earlier this year, DNN Find became a different mission. We decided to build a full blown search engine for DotNetNuke. Not one that would just index a single DNN site, but one that would allow you to index all portals in a DNN installation AND information from external sites. And how would external site indexing best be handled? …via RSS feed aggregation of course.

Seamus is the first of the two modules that make up the Venexus Search Engine. SEAMUS = Search Engine Aggregation Module Utilizing Syndication. On a side note, there is also an obscure Pink Floyd song that not many know from the Meddle album, about an old hound dog by the same name. Our hound dog “fetches” data and stores it to a table that has enabled MS SQL Server full-text indexing. But before I go into the specifics, I think it is important to know about the framework.

We started with traditional DotNetNuke module development…until EntitySpaces was released. I’m an old ASP/VB developer and personally, it took me a bit to get my head wrapped around how ES worked, but once I figured it out, I was hooked. ES saves the day by automagically generating all the CRUD (create, read, update, delete). While very similar to the logic of a BusinessController and InfoObject, ES uses Collections and Entities. But, where I found ES the most useful is the Dynamic Queries you can write directly into the business logic.

For example, in Seamus we need to check the domain to see if it matches one we are already indexing:

            Dim colDomains As New VenexusDomainCollection
            colDomains.Query.Select(colDomains.Query.DomainName, colDomains.Query.DomainID)
            colDomains.Query.Where(colDomains.Query.DomainName.Equal(GetDomainName(sURL)))
            colDomains.Query.Load()
            If colDomains.Count > 0 Then
                     ‘a bunch of removed logic goes here..
            End IF

With the colDomains.Query.Select, we are only returning the data we need rather than all columns. With the colDomains.Query.Where, I eliminated the need to:

Write a stored proc just to retrieve by DomainName
Iterate through the entire table, every row of all domains, just to find the one I am looking for.

I won’t even go into the performance gain of not having to loop through those rows of all columns, nor the time (even though it would be simple) to write a stored proc to pass in DomainName and have it return the DomainID.

Here is an example of adding a record to Seamus for a new feed:

         Dim entFeed As New VenexusSeamus
         entFeed.AddNew()
         entFeed.Url = txtURL.Text
         entFeed.Title = txtTitle.Text
         entFeed.Account = txtAccount.Text
         entFeed.Password = txtPassword.Text
         entFeed.CacheTime = txtCacheTime.Text
         entFeed.FeedTimeOut = txtTimeOut.Text
         entFeed.DateAdded = Now()
         entFeed.DateUpdated = "1/1/1901"
           If chkActive.Checked = True Then
              entFeed.IsActive = True
            Else
                entFeed.IsActive = False
            End If
         entFeed.Save()

Easy enough, eh?

And here is an update of a feed for Seamus:

    Dim entFeed As New VenexusSeamus
    entFeed.LoadByPrimaryKey(hidRSSID.Value)
    entFeed.Url = txtURL.Text
    entFeed.Title = txtTitle.Text
    entFeed.Account = txtAccount.Text
    entFeed .Password = txtPassword.Text
    entFeed.CacheTime = txtCacheTime.Text
    entFeed.FeedTimeOut = txtTimeOut.Text
    entFeed.DateAdded = Now()
    entFeed.DateUpdated = "1/1/1901"
          If chkActive.Checked = True Then
              entFeed.IsActive = True
          Else
                entFeed.IsActive = False
          End If
    entFeed .Save()

And a delete example:

    Dim entFeed As New VenexusSeamus
    entFeed.LoadByPrimaryKey(hidRSSID.Value)
    entFeed.MarkAsDeleted()
    entFeed.Save()

Yeah, it’s that easy. Makes you want to fire up your IDE eh?

Sure, I have used DAL Builder Pro, which was a huge time saver, but EntitySpaces made me to never want to develop any other way. Plus, last I checked, DAL Builder Pro was still only for DNN 3 development. The ease of generating the DAL and the ability to easily REgenerate the DAL if the database schema changes, makes ES the tool of choice for all of our module development. I cannot even begin to count the hours I have previously spent hand coding changes in a DAL due to spec changes. Oh how I wish I had all those hours back!

With the new DNN admin grid templates, it is just ridiculous how much code is generated before having to write the first line. The new template will generate an editable grid of the table(s), with sorting, paging, and search. If you are interested in .Net development (this is not just a DNN tool, it works for all .Net 2.0 development and using C# or VB.Net), you must check it out.

NOTE: Just so you know, we do not have any affiliation or partnership with EntitySpaces, we just think their tool rocks.

So, even though we had much of the initial Seamus development completed, we scrapped it and started development with ES. This will make future modifications and additions so much easier, saving time in the long run.

With that said, here is how Seamus works…

After you install Seamus, you can go into the module settings:

So in this example, the display for Seamus should show the top 10 items last indexed, each with a link to the actual item in the Title and using the “…More” link. A feed icon will also be displayed that provides a link to a RSS feed for the top 10 items.

Here is an example of the display:

Now while the above example does not show any local items (tabs or modules from this site), it does have items indexed from other sites. All of these items were from RSS feeds that were aggregated. As a module editor, you have the ability to manage external feeds (or local feeds if so desired, but we will go into more detail about how Seamus works shortly). But, if there were local items visible, they would only be visible if you have the proper permissions. Seamus checks permissions on any local site at the module and tab level for the display and the RSS feed.

Here is an example of the feeds we are are currently indexing on the Venexus Search Engine:

Here is the interface for adding new feeds:

Now we will get into how Seamus works…

First off, on the first load of Seamus, a dump of data from all modules supporting the IPortable interface (currently limited to DNN Core modules) is performed to ensure that there is data in the index. And every X hours (determined in module settings), the index is checked for new, updated, and deleted pages/modules.

Secondly, any feeds that have been added to Seamus are aggregated 5 at a time, order by last updated. And, while the user is sitting on the page, every 30 seconds that pass, 5 more feeds are aggregated via AJAX. This user interactive aggregating decreases the load on the server, rather than running as a scheduled task like the core DNN Search.

In order to save bandwidth, and to not tick off the owners of the websites you are aggregating data from, Seamus has what I call “smart caching”. Each time a feed is requested, if the information in the feed as not been updated, Seamus will increase the cache time. If the feed has been updated, it will request the same feed sooner than it had previously, decreasing the cache time. Over time, and based on the “average” a feed it updated, Seamus learns when to check again for updates, all while obeying TTLs.

Seamus will also index the current page/tab it is sitting on. Now you may be asking why you would index a page that displays items that have already been indexed. Well, Seamus can be setup to not display the top X items and/nor the RSS feed. Here is an example:

With the above Seamus settings and the module settings to display on all pages and set to not display the container or using an “invisible” container, when a user lands on any page of the site, the page is indexed. You can index your entire site by letting the users "crawl" the website. Also, when the page is updated, the index will be updated. Here is the module settings example:

So, not only does Seamus index all portals in the DNN installation by doing a dump of all modules that support the IPortable interface and individual page indexing based on user interaction, it will also aggregate and index data from other sites. This gives you the ability to create a full blown search engine for your niche. For example, let say you have a website about racing. You could have your entire DNN site indexed, along with aggregation of more racing data from the following sites:

http://www.sportsline.com/partners/feeds/rss/auto_news

http://rss.news.yahoo.com/imgrss/events/sp/042103autoformula

http://rss.cnn.com/rss/si_motorsports.rss

Not only are you able to display a list of the last items indexed in order to keep a page from becoming stagnant, you can also provide a RSS feed for your users, giving them a reason to return to your site. I will save a Seamus and SEO discussion for another time, but here is an example site for a legal search engine.

Speaking of time, I am once again out of it. Part III will be a discussion of the second module, the search form module. Stay tuned...

And then there was Search...Part I

Jeff Smith — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 16:12:18 GMT

I know a lot of people have been waiting on this and it is literally been over 5 years in the making, but it is now time to tell the story of how the Venexus Search Engine came to be…

Bots, Crawlers, and Spiders, Oh My!

Once upon a time, long, long ago, well over 5 years ago anyway, but that’s like ancient history in terms of the web, I wrote a little script to rip down free fonts off of a font directory website, who shall remain nameless since they are still around today. FontGrabber.vbs crawled their entire website saving zip files of free font packages. If I remember correctly, it pulled down almost 5000 font packages in a few hours. What a time saver! And my crawler addiction began to set in…

MediaGrabber

The next crawler I wrote extracted data from an online database of live music recordings. I dumped about 10 to 12 thousand records into a custom media database. My crawling habit had now increased to an hour or 2 a week perfecting the use of HTTPGets using XMLHTTP and making modification to scrape other data from the site based on URL parameters.

Many variations of MediaGrabber were developed over the years for aggregating data. Some of the variations include:

PhotoGrabber - For consuming one of the stock photography buffett sites. An interesting note, the one we crawled, which will also remain nameless, started limiting the number of photo request per day the following month. I wonder if that had anything to do with what we were doing...hehe.
FDAUpdater - For pulling down pharmaceutical data from the FDA to be used on a pharmacy website. Enough said about that one.
CategoryDump - For pulling category names from Yahoo and DMOZ.
And others...

Madhatter

Madhatter was my first bot. It was a VBScript that sat in a Direct Connect P2P Server application. Madhatter started as a trigger bot. A user would type a message into the chat and if it contained keywords or phrases that matched a list of keywords and response(s), the bot would automatically reply with a random response from the list that was associated with that keyword. Over time, I added around 1000 different responses to about 400 keywords. Madhatter then received search capabilities. You could type +search <band> or +search <date> and it would return a top 100 list of media records from a database of about 20000 records that matched with a link pointing them to the website with the information. I then gave the ability for the Operators to allow Madhatter speak on their behalf. So in addition to Madhatter automatically responding, the operator would make new responses to the user messages via Madhatter. This worked so well, and I guess to some degree could be considered my first AI application, that many DC newbies really thought it was a live person responding to their messages, even when Madhatter was running solo. I even setup the bot so that if a user tried to send Madhatter a private message chat, it would display in the Operators chat. This led to untold hours of entertainment watching people talk to a rude, trash talking bot that would kick them off the hub if they responded in a derogatory manner. Just thinking about it again makes me want to write a DNN Bot, maybe not one as feisty as Madhatter. Or maybe “bot” interactive search anyone?

Tiny IntRAnet Crawler

I started working for Semiconductor Research Corporation in August 2001 as their Web Administrator/Developer. At that time they only had a website and a forums website. The forums website was using a product called SiteScope which was written in TCL, but we will not even go there in fear of recurring nightmares .The SRC main site was not built using a Content Management System, rather a Staging to Dev push of content. I think it was sometime in early 2002, I began writing my first true crawler that would consume all items in a domain.

The need was simple…with the amount of content we had on the site, there was bound to be broken links, missing images, orphaned files, and God forbid, 500 server errors. We needed something that would crawl the site and search for any issues, compare the file system, and generate a report for the Content Management Team. I was still using XMLHTTP component for grabbing the data until I found ASPTear. ASPTear proved to be faster and was the HTTP component of choice until I found NSoftware. NSoft’s HTTP component was far superior to any of the others for speed and with many more methods/objects that could be utilized.

SRC had a pretty big main site and we began developing 2 other websites to fall under the SRC umbrella. This lead to TIC 2.0, which crawled all 3 domains, and would (and probably still does) generate a report of any issues. With TIC now crawling more than one website and doing it dynamically (could jump from one domain and then the other with the FIFO [First In First Out] URL queue/stack), the need came to check the first link offsite. Why? In case the link moved (301 or 302), or was generating a 404. We have no control what some site may do to their content, but we sure wanted to know if our users were going to get an error if it was broken. TIC would find those problem links and let the CM Team know they needed to remove the link, or change the URL to the new redirect. Now comes TIC 3.0...

Tiny IntERnet Crawler

One night I was goofing around with TIC and decided to turn off the function that performs the domain or first link offsite check and just let it run…and run. And it did, all night long. When I got up the next morning, it had crawled almost 30,000 pages and had built a queue of over 100,000. Now I was hooked. How could I get more data and faster? Since TIC was a script and utilized a central database for the URL queue, instead of an in memory stack, I was able run multiple instances of the crawler. 10 instances of TIC 3.0 crawling brought my little home router to its knees. In fact, it choked and rolled over tits up. In three hours, over 110,000 pages were crawled, over 500,000 URLs queued, and had sucked down over a gig of data. Whoa…this was getting fun.

Over the next year or so I really was tweaking TIC quite a bit. I’d let it run for weeks at a time. I quickly realized I was going to run into a big problem…Disk space. The database was getting bloated and slowing down dramatically after it had indexed over 1 million pages and had over 5 more million queued. While those numbers are a drop in the bucket when compared to the 800 pound gorillas of search, it is still a lot of data for such a small operation. And, TIC would crawl anything, all file types. So I started curbing back what TIC looked for…all the way down to just XML. TIC, as the last version in use, now looks just for XML files anywhere on the Internet. Of course I added tweaks to check domain importance or linking page importance based on keywords and altered the queueing process so that TIC would not get stuck on a crappy domain. But that is a discussion for another time.

Tiny XML Spider

So with TIC crawling the web looking for XML files, TXS was developed to crawl and index the XML files TIC found. TXS runs continuously, iterating through all “approved” RSS feeds (about 2,500 of over 100,000). For each feed it parses through the articles and stores anything new to the database. If the feed has been updated, TXS will return in less time. Feeds that have not been updated will be crawled the next time after a longer duration. I call this “smart caching”, which will be discussed in the features of Seamus later on. TXS has aggregated over 1.7 million articles from only 2500 news feeds. Not bad considering how much other data we have to collect from feeds that have not been approved. We have been stuffing the aggregated data into a combination of DNN websites for SEO reasons.

DNNFind

DNNFind = DotNetNuke Fulltext INDexing. At some point about 2 years ago, and with TXS bringing in the data, we decided to build a DNN module that would perform a SQL Server fulltext index query against the aggregated data and return the results. While this is not a bot, crawler, or spider, it is a fundamental step of searching the data, which we will get into when discussing the search module of VSE.

DNN Spider

I started developing a standalone VB.Net application for crawling DotNetNuke websites. This was my first multi-threaded application. While similar to TIC, this application would allow 1 to many threads to be used to handle the crawling. What we found is that we can use the application for stress testing DotNetNuke websites by throwing a few hundred or thousand request at it. And, we can use multiple applications running on different servers to really pound away at a box. However, this got me thinking about distributing the load of crawling against the users of the website, which is why we are using AJAX to request more data from Seamus. More on that later on as well.

Okay, so you made it this far and you are probably asking why I have not even started to describe what the Venexus Search Engine does. Well, I think it is important to understand the background of the application and how it came to be. It’s not like we just came up with some flimsy half-brain ideas about how a search engine should be done, but rather years of trial and error. And, I want everyone to realize that our product is not going to disappear, but get stronger as we add more functionality from all of the code we have written over the years. With that said, here are the details...

Sorry, I am out of time and you will have to wait for Part II of this post.

In the meantime, if you want to see Venexus Search Engine in action, go to search.venexus.com. To read more about VSE, go here.

REQUIREMENTS FOR VENEXUS SEARCH ENGINE

DotNetNuke 4.3.5
SQL Server supporting Full-Text Indexing
.Net full trust for EntitySpaces and Reflection usage

If you would like to test our release candidate, please reply in a comment to this post and I will send you the PA's.

SQL Server Express with Full-Text Indexing

Jeff Smith — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 00:31:30 GMT

Did you know that SQL Server Express now has Full-Text Indexing? With the soon to be release of our DotNetNuke search module, which requires SQL Server Full-Text Indexing, I thought it would be helpful to make a post here for those who did not know the differences between SQL Server Express versions.

SQL Server Express Edition Comparison

You have several specific products to choose from when you install SQL Server Express Edition Use the following table to see how features for SQL Server compare across other Express Edition products.

Express Edition Products for SQL Server Compared
Feature	SQL Server 2005 Express Edition	SQL Server 2005 Express Edition with Advanced Services	SQL Server 2005 Express Edition Toolkit
Database Engine	*	*
Client Components	*	*	*
Full Text Search		*
Reporting Services		*
Management Studio Express		*	*
Business Intelligence Developer Studio			*

Each SQL Server Express Edition product has a specific use. Read the following sections to learn how each Express Edition product for SQL Server compares to the others.

SQL Server 2005 Express Edition

How does the Express Edition of SQL Server compare to other SQL Server Express Edition products? SQL Server Express Edition is perfect for use as an embedded database for a desktop application that requires a fully functional SQL Server Database Engine. SQL Server Express offers the smallest package size for faster downloads or to conserve space on deployment media.

SQL Server 2005 Express Edition with Advanced Services

How does the Express Edition with Advanced Services for SQL Server compare to the other SQL Server Express Edition products? SQL Server 2005 Express Edition with Advanced Services is perfect for use as a backend to a small, multiuser application that requires more advanced features such as Web reporting or Full-text Search.

SQL Server 2005 Express Edition Toolkit

How does the Express Edition Toolkit for SQL Server compare to other SQL Server Express Edition products? Install this package if you need the management tools and client components, but do not need the Database Engine.

Source: MSDN

Ready to download SQL Server 2005 Express with Advanced Services (has Full-Text Index)? Its free and here.

DotNetNuke Google Alerts

Jeff Smith — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 00:55:52 GMT

If you are not familiar with Google Alerts, you should check it out. I have been tracking things from Google Alerts for at least 2 years, maybe longer. While I have noticed more things coming in for "DotNetNuke", starting on October 27th I noticed ALOT more alerts for "DotNetNuke" coming in. What did they all have in common? BLOGS. Also a few days ago, while looking into the activity of this blog, I noticed a new user agent I had not seen:

Feedfetcher-Google; (+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html)

If you go to that link, you are redirected to a FAQ page and at the bottom is a section called Feedfetcher. Here is an interesting Q and A:

How do I request that Google not retrieve some or all of my site's feeds?

Since Feedfetcher requests are all user-initiated, it does not follow the typical robots.txt guidelines for robots. For detailed information about how to prevent Feedfetcher from requesting all or part of your site, please see our removal instructions.

Very interesting. I was under the assumption that any "bot", and I will define Feedfetcher as a "bot" regardless of whether it is "user-initiated" or not, should obey robots.txt.

With that said, our feed aggregation module for Venexus Search Engine, called Seamus, does obey robots.txt. I am sure this discussion will come about with the release of VSE, so I decided to go ahead and post it now in preparation. And speaking of Venexus Search Engine...we have made the final compile and are finishing testing tonight...but more on that later.

MS SQL Server Full-Text Indexing Info Dump

Jeff Smith — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 05:28:44 GMT

The following is a collection of information I have collected, found, and written concerning MS SQL Server Full-Text Indexing. In order to keep it in a single place, I decided to dump it all here and update as needed...

SQL Server 2005 Full-text Indexing came with several new features:

Significant performance increases especially with indexing.
A dedicated indexing service that works directly with SQL Serrver. This speeds up full-text operations and isolates SQL Server from changes to the search service made by other applications.
Secure by default. All iFilters (the component which extracts the text from the content stored in the rows) must be signed before SQL Server FTS will load them.
The ability to full-text index Indexed Views which simplifies partitioning.
Data definition language (DDL) statements for creating and altering full-text catalogs and indexes.
Improved Language Support SQL 2005 FTS now supports indexing and searching in 23 different languages. SQL 2005 FTS will respect language tags stored in the content which the iFilter can interpret. You can also override the language settings on a column in your query.
Accent Insensitivity-SQL FTS can now be configured to be accent insensitive so searches on resume will match with résumé. This option is enabled by default, but can be disabled.
Noise Insensitivity-SQL FTS queries will no longer break when one of the search arguments (SARGs) is a noise word. This option is enabled by default, but can be disabled.
Thesaurus support in the Contains and FreeText predicates.
Multi-Column Queries-SQL FTS supports searching a single full-text indexed column, all full-text indexed columns, or a sub-set of the full-text indexed columns in a single query.
Support for linked servers-It is now possible to query full-text catalogs on remote server through a linked server.
Replication support If a table is full-text indexed you can replicate the full-text properties to your subscriber if the subscription database is full-text enabled.
Backup and restored support for full-text catalogs. You can now backup your full-text catalog and restore it on a different server.
Attach/detach full-text catalogs with your databases. You can include your full-text catalog in your detached database files and optionally reattach your full-text catalogs along with your database.
Properties SQL FTS 2005 now supports the indexing and querying of document properties stored in the Image or VarBinary(MAX) data type columns.
Full-text indexing for XML data.
Troubleshooting utilities two new utilities ship with SQL 2005 to assist in the troubleshooting efforts:
- lrtest - an executable which allows you to see how the word breakers interpret a token at query time and at index time
- CiDump - a tool which allows you to view the contents of your catalog to determine what is indexed, and how tokens are stored in the index.
You can find these file in C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\Binn
The indexing logs are now stored as plain text in C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\Log
Integration with SQL Profiler and logging of index operations.

If you have never used Full-text indexing, it's pretty easy to setup...

Go into the database properties and enable full-text indexing:

Right click on the table and select Full-Text Index > Define Full-Text Index...

Wizard will popup, click Next:

Select the Primary Key:

Select the columns you want to index:

Start a full population when complete:

Since we already had a few other catalogs, we needed to create a new one. And, this new catalog will now become the default catalong by slecting the option.

We also wanted to create a recurring task to populate the catalog daily while we are testing:

Just click Finish!

Alternatively you can use the following queries to create a Full-Text Index:

EXEC sp_fulltext_database 'enable'

EXEC sp_fulltext_table 'BrainDump', 'create', 'BrainDumpCatalog', 'PK_BrainDump'

EXEC sp_fulltext_column 'BrainDump', 'IndexWashedContent', 'add'

EXEC sp_fulltext_table 'BrainDump', 'activate'

EXEC sp_fulltext_table 'BrainDump', 'start_full'

If you go back and right click on the table and Full-Text Index, you will now see an option to "Stop Population". This means that the catalog is being built. Depending on the size of your table, once it has completed a population of the catalog, you can start performing queries...

There are four additions to SQL Server's version of SQL that allow access to full-text catalogs:

CONTAINS is used in the WHERE clause of a query to find matches to exact words and phrases, with other options such as word proximity, weighted terms, and inflection of words.
CONTAINSTABLE has the same functionality as CONTAINS but is used in the FROM clause of a query and offers the added ability to incorporate relevancy to the results.
FREETEXT is used in the WHERE clause of a query to perform matches on the meaning of the words or phrase.
FREETEXTTABLE is similar to FREETEXT except that it's used in the FROM clause and can add relevancy to the results.

Example Queries:

SELECT IndexWashedContent FROM BrainDump WHERE CONTAINS (IndexWashedContent, ' "someword anotherword" ')

SELECT IndexWashedContent FROM BrainDump WHERE FREETEXT(IndexWashedContent, 'someword')

Search using NEAR finds words that are close together:

SELECT IndexWashedContent FROM BrainDump WHERE CONTAINS(IndexWashedContent, '"someword*" NEAR anotherword')

You can also supply a weighted list of terms to CONTAINS, and it will prefer matches with a higher weight:

SELECT IndexWashedContent FROM BrainDump WHERE CONTAINS(IndexWashedContent, 'ISABOUT (someword weight (.8), anotherword weight (.4), andanotherword weight (.2) )' )

Full-text Indexing Performance:

Microsoft recommends these two settings for optimum performance:

The virtual memory (PAGEFILE.SYS file) setting for your operating system should be set to an amount equal to 3 times the amount of physical RAM in the server. If you have a non-dedicated SQL Server (a server running applications in addition to SQL Server) then you will want to add the virtual memory needs of these other applications to the amount calculated above.

The SQL Server MAX SERVER MEMORY setting should be set manually (dynamic memory allocation is turned off) so that enough virtual memory is left for the Full-Text Search service to run. To achieve this, select a MAX SERVER MEMORY setting that once set, leaves enough virtual memory so that the Full-Text Search service is able to access an amount of virtual memory equal to 1.5 times the amount of physical RAM in the server. This will take some trial and error to achieve this setting.

To find out how much virtual memory is being used by SQL Server and the Full-Text Search Service, you can use the Task Manager. By default, the Task Manager does not display the amount of virtual memory used by a process. To see this number in Task Manager, you must first go to the "Processes" tab. Once there, select "View", and then "Select Columns". From the "Select Columns" dialog box, click on "Virtual Memory Size", then "OK". Now you will be able to see the amount of virtual memory size used by each process on your server using Task Manager. Use this information to help you tune your server for use with the Full-Text Search service.

More Info:
Extending 2005 FTS

Language Features

Using Full-Text Search Catalogs

Extensions to SQL Server to Support Full-Text Search

Have anything to add? Please let us know.

DNN FIND Initial Release Requirements Survey

Jeff Smith — Sat, 18 Feb 2006 00:27:02 GMT

We are gathering requirements for the initial release of DNN FIND, a DotNetNuke search module. There are 2 pieces to this project, the crawler/spider and the fulltext indexing based search module. Currently the crawler/spider is a standalone multi-threaded VB.Net application that we are considering embedding inside of a DotNetNuke module and scheduled service (Host > Schedule). However for large sites, it may be critical for performance to crawl from a seperate server. Also, full text indexing is not included in SQL Server 2005 Express. To get an idea about the website environment of users in the community, we are running a survey to gather requirements for the initial release.

We are considering the following options:

DNN FIND Lite Version: a free DotNetNuke module that utilizes web services to query for results and limited to 250 pages indexed.
DNN FIND Standard Version: a DotNetNuke Module that untilizes web services to query for results and limited to 1000 pages indexed.
DNN FIND Pro Version: a DotNetNuke Module that utilizes a scheduled crawler/spider embedded in DotNetNuke to use collected data for local full text indexing and search. Limited to 5000 pages.
DNN FIND Enterprise Version: A crawler/spider standalone application and a DNN module for querying the fulltext index for the largest of websites. Unlimited pages.

To see an example of our "global search" in development, based on full text indexing, please see the DNN FIND website and/or Find News. Find News now has almost 900,000 articles/pages it its full text index.

So, if you are interested in a DotNetNuke search module for your site, please answer the web environment questions we have in the following: Release Requirements Survey.

If you are interested in beta testing, please let us know by completing the form on the Spider page.

Tracking Link Clicks in Search Results

Jeff Smith — Sun, 15 Jan 2006 06:18:31 GMT

Working on the DNN FIND project, I thought I would kick around a few ideas about building "importance" into a URL based on user interaction. In a old pre-DNN project, I simply had a page that processed the link click similar to the way DNN Links Module works by using LinkClick.aspx and parameters for the link information, before redirecting to the site. However, I would prefer a solution that went directly to the site, so that the Back button could be used (pressing Back would go back to the redirect page that sends you forward). Plus, I wanted something that would show the real URL in the window status, without setting it using JavaScript. So, this is what I came up with...

The following script is dynamically generated on the Search Results page to include the searchID (every unique search performed against the database has an ID):

The HTML for the link in the search results looks like this:
<a href="http://www.venexus.com" onmousedown="return DNNFclk('7890','1')">Venexus</a>

How does it work?

When a user clicks a link in the search results, it fires off a JavaScript to fetch an "image", passing in the ID for the url and search results rank. This "image" is really a page that collects the information from the user. On the page that processes the click, basically the curRank and searchID is used in the algorithm that computes the new URL importance. This allows us to track what the user clicks on in order to update the URL ranking.

I have not had the chance to add this to DNN FIND yet, but it should be a great improvement.

Ideas for DNN FIND:

By also tracking the user session, we could check the timeframe from one click to the next. If the timeframes are too close, we could DECREASE the rank. Close timeframes represent bad search results because the user did not spend any time on the site for the link they clicked.

DNN FIND Spider v0.2 - A DotNetNuke Spider

Jeff Smith — Fri, 23 Dec 2005 17:12:58 GMT

DNN FIND Spider version 0.2 was built this morning after a successful nightly crawl test last night.

DNN FIND Spider (DNNFS) is currently a standalone VB.Net application that spiders the web. We are using the spider to crawl DotNetNuke sites for inclusion in the DNN FIND index. Currently the DNN FIND index is comprised of data collected from RSS feeds and the DNNFS. If you have a feed or site that you would like to have aggregated or crawled, please let us know: support at DNN FIND dot com.

Current Features:

Written in VB.Net
Stores data in MS SQL Server
Multi-threaded spider
Obeys robots.txt
Obeys meta robots tags
Stores HTML and parsed (HTML removed) data
Site specific crawls

Direction:
So many crawlers, so little time! The goal is to get all of the other VBScript and Visual Basic (not .net) crawlers/spiders we have built into a single mega .Net spider. Porting the features and functionality of other crawlers we have, like TIC and TXS, is a first priority. However, the first objective is to make DNNFS to be a "global" crawler, rather than just a site specific crawler.

Currently DNNFS will crawl a single domain at a time, which is great for adding TIC features like HTTP Header Status reports for non-200 responses, giving a detailed view of problems on the website. In the hands of a DNN site operator, this could be used to view issues on the site that might otherwise be unknown without digging through web logs.

But, the work to be done next involves porting code to utilize a central database queue. By doing so, it will allow for multiple spiders to be setup on multiple servers, each talking back to the central queue for the next URL to be processed. Also, the queue can be manipulated by URL importance instead of relying on First In First Out queueing. With TIC, a global crawler, we have Domain AND URL importance affecting the queue. While a crawl is happening, an algorithm computes the "importance" of a URL based upon the importance of the domain and keywords found within the document. The more documents found on a site with related keywords, the higher the domain importance, which results in a higher URL importance during crawl time. However, this comes with a performance issue and may best be added as a backend process that updates the queue continuously. Most DNN operators would not need such features nor do they have sites to be crawled that have hundreds of thousands of pages like some of the sites we host. However, some of them might have large sites and/or would be interested in contributing their crawl data, which begs the question of developing a thin client for DNN operators.

Definite Features to be included in future releases:

XML document support for crawl updates (similar to how Google sitemaps work)
RSS support for site update notifications
Non-200 status header response reporting
Global crawls
Central queue processing
Multiple crawler support

Ideas we are kicking around:

A distributed thin client for DNN operators
DNNFS as a website stress tester? It would be easy to increase the number of threads by x fold to make a stress tester.
Web services for remote queries

If anyone has any features, functionalities, or ideas that can be added to DNNFS that would help the DNN community, please let us know: support at DNN FIND dot com.

DotNetNuke Search Engine - Module and Spider

Jeff Smith — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 04:57:21 GMT

DotNetNuke Search Engine...I noticed that there is now a page on the DotNetNuke site for the core DNN Search Project. I have not had a chance to explore much of the forum they provide on the page, but most of what I see are questions about how to use the module, instead of nitty gritty application details. I hope to find more details about any changes that took place between the previous version and DNN 4 and post them here for reference.

In the meatime, I am still working on the DotNetNuke Spider and Fulltext Search module. Unfortunately, several other projects have forced this on the back burner, but I try to squeeze in a line or two of code every night...

The DNN Spider will have the following features:

Multi-threaded crawling
Parsing ability

My biggest issue with other crawlers I have played with is their speed for larger websites or crawling patterns. I hope to provide a solution that alleviates any performance issues by utlizing a central database for queue processing. I'll keep you posted as it progresses...

The DNN FIND Module will have the following features:

Portal specific search
Global search via web services
Fulltext Indexing of DNN Spider results
Noise word filtering
Supports "+" searches
Supports "-" searches
Double quoted phrases
LSI keyword augmented results
User interactive ranking algorithm

An example of the fulltext search module can be found at DNN FIND. Please note that this module is still in development and that not all features are available in this example.

Stay tuned for more...