All You Ever Wanted to Know About: Advanced Search Technology from Sun Labs

If you want to really understand Stephen Green's Advanced Search Project, here is your chance.

Mar. 29, 2004 - Finding the exact information you are looking for is hard, whether you are searching the Internet or searching inside an enterprise -- Sun, for example. But remember searching card catalogs? And then taking your lists of what you hoped were the right numbers on an odyssey into the stacks to search for the books or documents you needed? Search engines, even when search results give you multiple pages of results, are a big improvement. And powering a search engine with Sun's Advanced Search Technology makes searching even faster, easier and more accurate.

This Advanced Search Technology technical white paper offers an in-depth look at how search technology fits into the whole environment of information seeking. It explores the question of why search is such a hard problem and how research completed by the Sun Labs Conceptual Indexing project and the new Sun Labs Advanced Search project helps to solve it. Some of the topics covered include an explanation of how searching differs from browsing, why search results are often unsatisfactory, and how intranets differ from the Internet. Finally, the paper takes a close look at some of the patented search functions developed in the Sun Labs Advanced Search project, explains why they perform so well, and why they offer a big competitive advantage to Sun.

Advanced Search technology is now a standard feature in two Sun server products: Sun Java(TM) System Portal Server and Sun Java System Web Server. Subscribers to the Sun Java Enterprise System get both, saving money in licensing fees and saving employees' time -- advanced search technology helps users find information five times faster than standard Boolean search engines.

And it ONLY took 10 years of research!