Search Software Times

In a couple of hours I added a full featured search facility to Software Times using the Atomz Search from Atomz Corporation. I'm impressed!!!

It's simple as pie.

• First they ask you for the URL of the web site (www.softwaretimes.com) and they send in a crawler that visits all the linked pages. The crawler looks at all the stuff and creates an index of your site on their server. In case not all the pages you want to index pages are linked to the home page, they ask you to provide an alternate URL with these missing links.
• Next you can do several things:
  • Make a list of common words you don't want indexed (a, to, for, not, etc.)
  • Make a list of synonyms (lambda, frequency, color)
  • Customize the results page which is served from their server
  • Include and exclude files and directories
  • Set up schedules for updating the index and other house keeping stuff

They give you all the HTML code you need right on their web page. Even though the results page is served from their server, you can customize it to look just like one of your own pages.

For web sites with less than 500 pages, they don't charge you anything! After 500 pages, they start with $500 per year which is less than $1.50 per day. The amount of time and the cost of the software you don't have to buy, more than justify this price.

I found the company (private) very impressive. It was founded by two guys from Macromind. They have an impressive list of customers including garage.com, the venture capital firm run by Guy Kawasaki of Apple Macintosh Evangelism fame. One of the investors is the law firms Fenwick & West LLP. My Silicon Valley attorney works for them so I know this is a serious firm (Apple is or was their client as well).

The good news is that now you can search Software Times by content. On the Advanced Search page there is a link to the Atomz Search Tips pages so I didn't even have to create a tutorial or anything. These guys really know how to save you time!

Denny
"Demand creates queues. Supply gets rid of them."