From:	 Kir Kolyshkin <kir@asplinux.ru>
To:	 lwn@lwn.net
Subject: ASPSeek progress (for "Development" section @lwn)
Date:	 Tue, 25 Sep 2001 13:43:58 +0400

We have recently released ASPSeek v.1.2.5. Among
other improvements, it introduces new storage mode -
UTF-8 (this is a variant of unicode that uses only 1
byte for ASCII characters). Also, a full set of manual
pages is provided (they are also available online
at http://www.aspseek.org/manual.html). We have also
fixed numerous bugs so chances are high this release
will be even more stable for users.

For those who is not familiar with ASPSeek, this is
a search engine software, much like Google, but for
smaller volumes (up to several million URLs). It has
all the "bells and whistles" you can expect from a
decent search engine - phrase and boolean search,
word patterns, , ability to limit search to particular
site/set of sites/subsection of site, or particular
part of HTML documents. Search results can be sorted
by relevance (advanced ranking algorythms are used)
or by date. ASPSeek can work with multiple
languages/encodings at once (including multibyte
encodings such as Chinese). Other features include
stopwords and ispell support, a charset and language
guesser, HTML templates for search results, excerpts,
and query words highlighting.

ASPSeek is written in C++ using the STL library. It
uses MySQL for data storage, but data that affects
search speed is stored in binary files. And yes,
ASPSeek is free software, it is available under the
GNU GPL.

Future plans for ASPSeek includes further optimization
of internal data structures and algorythms for even
more performance, as well as developing some nifty
features.

Regards,
  Kir Kolyshkin, ASPSeek developer.

-- 
kir@asplinux.ru  ICQ 7551596  Phone +7 903 6722750
Reality always seems harsher in the early morning.
--