THUNDERSTONE NEWS

November 2009 - Archive

CONTENTS

HAPPY THANKSGIVING

"November had come; the crops were in, and barn, buttery, and bin were overflowing with the harvest that rewarded the summer's hard work. The big kitchen was a jolly place just now, for in the great fireplace roared a cheerful fire; on the walls hung garlands of dried apples, onions, and corn; up aloft from the beams shone crook-necked squashes, juicy hams, and dried venison – for in those days deer still haunted the deep forests, and hunters flourished. Savory smells were in the air; on the crane hung steaming kettles, and down among the red embers copper saucepans simmered, all suggestive of some approaching feast."

From An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving
November, 1881. By Louisa May Alcott

INTRODUCING THUNDERSTONE'S TEXIS CATALOG SOLUTION
(OUR NEW E-COMMERCE SEARCH ENGINE)

Thunderstone's Texis technology has a long tradition of hard-to-match success in efficiently handling the search requirements for very high-volume eCommerce applications such as real-time online auctions, large-scale retail websites and many others.

Now organizations of all sizes can put this same powerful capability to work on your own B2B/B2C shopping sites, on your own web-based catalogs, etc.

The Texis Catalog Solution offers an amazing value proposition, and it comes available in your choice of:

  • downloadable software with a one-time, perpetual license;
  • custom-configured Parametric Search Appliance with a one-time, perpetual license; or
  • a hosted service (SaaS) – provided by Thunderstone for an affordable monthly rate.

You can arrange to see the Texis Catalog Solution "in action" by scheduling a free demo that employs your own unstructured and structured product data.

Please contact Thunderstone's Fred Harmon at or call +1 216 820 2200 if you would like more information.

CUSTOMER QUOTE OF THE MONTH

"Thank you so much for your prompt and amazing customer service. We really enjoy working with you guys, especially because we get to interact with real people at your company rather than dealing with random customer service folks overseas."

H.B Vess

TECH TIP: USING SYNONYMS IN YOUR SEARCH

Thunderstone search products have the ability to use a thesaurus when searching to match alternate words with the same meaning. There are two types of sources for synonyms:

  1. built-in – There's a built-in English thesaurus for matching normal words and synonyms.

  2. custom – You can use your own custom thesaurus. This can be useful for things that aren't necessarily really synonyms but you want to treat them as such – acronyms that get expanded out, product name changes, etc. Please see your product's documentation for details on setting this up.

The custom thesaurus can be used instead of or in addition to the built-in thesaurus. The profile's "Synonyms" search setting affects how synonyms are used.

Possible values are:

  • Disabled (default) – no synonym processing is allowed.

  • Phrase Recognition only – synonyms are not used, but the thesaurus is used to recognize phrases. If someone searches for state of the art searches, it will recognize 'state of the art' as a phrase and search for "state of the art" searches and not match a page about the current state of searching for art treasures.

  • Phrases & Allow Synonyms – recognizes phrases, as above, and allows uses to turn on synonym processing for a query word by adding ~ (a tilde) to the beginning. Searching for New York ~bridge would match a page about a New York underpass.

  • Phrases & Use synonyms by default – phrase recognition and synonym processing is turned on by default, the ~ disables it. Searching for New York bridge would match the underpass article, but New York ~bridge would not.

Feedback, suggestions and questions are welcome. Send your email to

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