[Westy]

Our little department at work has our own server with a few hundred thousand documents on it. In the past corporate IT policy has prevented us from installing a search engine which makes most of those documents usless. Our IT department has been real helpful and said we might be able to install a search engine if we find one they like, they provided no recommendations and my head is spinning after trying to find one myself.

Can anyone recommend one? Right now all I know is that I want something indexable for speed and capable of searching the body of most common file types.

 

[$tinkle]

not trying to be a smartass, but i just grep [or use 'find'] on a directory tree.

assuming you want this to work w/ normal people who are used to working w/ spreadsheets & word docs, i got nuthin'

in which case, you should google for one.

 

[Westy]

I've googled and come up with a bunch of results of products whose description I really don't understand. This is really just a case of my IT dept being dicks.

 

[binary visions]

Well, interestingly enough, Google themselves makes a hardware solution for indexing your file server and doing searches. It is, however, an expensive, hardware solution and I'm not sure what you're looking for.

I know nothing about server-side searching utilities.

Would it be possible to simply have your users install a desktop search application like Google Desktop and and search your network shares like that?

 

[Westy]

I looked at the Google solution. IT will not approve additional hardware. I'm currently using Google desktop to crawl these network drives but I need this to be able to work with 100+ field users and IT will not approve that for security reasons.

I'm basically going to have to go back to my boss and tell him I need some management weight to get this done. Having me spin my wheels is a complete waste of time.

Thanks for the help guys.

 

[$tinkle]

i got to thinking about this yesterday & was wondering: do you need something beyond what a typical windows search would provide? what i'm thinking is when you search (winkey-F, or F3 in explorer), you can provide text arguments to search. sure, it'll take ages on 100K+ documents, but that's better than a human search. may require someone to know how the doc tree is laid out so they don't start searching from the root dir.

is this what you need?