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Xapian
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Xapian

Overview
Synopsis

Xapian is an Open Source Search Engine Library, released under the GPL v2+. It's written in C++, with bindings to allow use from Perl, Python, PHP, Java, Tcl, C#, Ruby, Lua, Erlang, Node.js and R.

Category

Search Engine Server Free

Features

• Ranked probabilistic search - important words get more weight than unimportant words, so the most relevant documents are more likely to come near the top of the results list.
• Relevance feedback - given one or more documents, Xapian can suggest the most relevant index terms to expand a query, suggest related documents, categorise documents, etc.
• Phrase and proximity searching - users can search for words occurring in an exact phrase or within a specified number of words, either in a specified order, or in any order.
• Full range of structured boolean search operators ("stock NOT market", etc). The results of the boolean search are ranked by the probabilistic weights. Boolean filters can also be applied to restrict a probabilistic search.
• Supports stemming of search terms (e.g. a search for "football" would match documents which mention "footballs" or "footballer"). This helps to find relevant documents which might otherwise be missed. Snowball stemmers are currently included for Arabic, Armenian, Basque, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish.
• Wildcard search is supported (e.g. "xap*").
• Synonyms are supported, both explicitly (e.g. "~cash") and as an automatic form of query expansion.
• Dynamically generated snippets from matching documents can be generated, with matching words, phrases and wildcards highlighted.
• Xapian can suggest spelling corrections for user supplied queries. This is based on words which occur in the data being indexed, so works even for words which wouldn't be found in a dictionary (e.g. "xapian" would be suggested as a correction for "xapain").
• Faceted search is supported.
• Supports database files > 2GB - essential for scaling to large document collections.
• Platform independent data formats - you can build a database on one machine and search it on another.
• Allows simultaneous update and searching. New documents become searchable right away.

License

Open Source

Price

Free

Pricing

Subscription

Free Trial

Available

Users Size

Small (<50 employees), Medium (50 to 1000 Enterprise (>1001 employees)

Website
Company

Xapian

What is best?

• Free Software/Open Source - licensed under the GPL.
• Supports Unicode 9.0 (including codepoints beyond the BMP), and stores indexed text in UTF-8.
• Highly portable - runs on Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX and probably other Unix platforms; as well as Microsoft Windows and OS/2.
• Written in C++, with bindings allowing use from many other languages.

PAT Rating™
Editor Rating
Aggregated User Rating
Rate Here
Ease of use
7.6
8.1
Features & Functionality
7.6
9.3
Advanced Features
7.6
8.8
Integration
7.6
9.1
Performance
7.6
9.1
Training
Customer Support
7.6
Implementation
Renew & Recommend
Bottom Line

Xapian is a highly adaptable toolkit which allows developers to easily add advanced indexing and search facilities to their own applications. It supports the Probabilistic Information Retrieval model and also supports a rich set of boolean query operators.

7.6
Editor Rating
8.9
Aggregated User Rating
2 ratings
You have rated this

Xapian is an Open Source Search Engine Library, released under the GPL v2+. It's written in C++, with bindings to allow use from Perl, Python, PHP, Java, Tcl, C#, Ruby, Lua, Erlang, Node.js and R. Xapian is a highly adaptable toolkit which allows developers to easily add advanced indexing and search facilities to their own applications. It supports the Probabilistic Information Retrieval model and also supports a rich set of boolean query operators. If users are after a packaged search engine for their website, users should take a look at Omega: an application built upon Xapian. Unlike most other website search solutions, Xapian's versatility allows users to extend Omega to meet their needs as they grow.

Xapian is partly derived from the Open Muscat engine, developed by BrightStation PLC and released under the GPL v2+. Open Muscat was built to be a replacement for the proprietary Muscat 3.6 information retrieval system, which was written almost entirely in BCPL, and becoming hard to extend in the ways they wanted. Xapian can suggest spelling corrections for user supplied queries. This is based on words which occur in the data being indexed, so works even for words which wouldn't be found in a dictionary (e.g. "xapian" would be suggested as a correction for "xapain"). Xapian supports stemming of search terms (e.g. a search for "football" would match documents which mention "footballs" or "footballer"). This helps to find relevant documents which might otherwise be missed. Snowball stemmers are currently included for Arabic, Armenian, Basque, Catalan, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish.

 

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Ease of use
Features & Functionality
Advanced Features
Integration
Performance
Training
Customer Support
Implementation
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