THUNDERSTONE NEWS

January 2003 - Archive

CONTENTS

• Thunderstone Search Appliance
• New Webinator Features
• Subscription/Unsubscription and Contacts

The new Thunderstone Search Appliance provides organizations the simplicity of a hosted service without giving up the security and performance of a local solution. The Appliance is a complete web and intranet-search solution that comes configured and ready to use as soon as it is plugged into a network.

The Thunderstone Search Appliance handles 10 times the load of other turn-key search solutions, serving over 1,000 typical searches per minute. It does that by being based on Thunderstone's advanced Texis software. The Search Appliance can search links and content in JavaScript, Flash, PDF, and hundreds of other formats. Unlike appliances that index only a limited number of collections, the Thunderstone Appliance allows customers to create as many separate indexes as needed. More...

Webinator 4.2.5, just released, provides several enhancements:

• Cookie Inheritance. A new walk option, Cookie Source Path, reads Netscape and Explorer cookie files. This is useful for walking sites protected by a persistent cookie. The administrator can log in to the site with a browser, then set the Cookie Source Path to that browser's cookie file. That way Webinator inherits the Administrator's permissions, and can walk the site as if it logged in itself.
• POST Forms. For sites where the walk starting point is a login form, Webinator allows you to log in as follows. Define the base URL using the action= URL from the HTML form, appending the form variables as in this example:
  http://www.mysite.com/login.asp?Uname=yourname&Upass=yourpassword
  Until now, the walker could only send such URLs by the GET method, but sometimes these forms require POST. Beginning with 4.2.5, you can accomplish this by using the "protocol" prefix of http-post://... or https-post://... with the base URL.