What is the difference between the Extract, Swish, and Discover search engines?

Each of these search methods has its own strengths which can be utilized for different purposes.

The Extract! utility is designed for searching record oriented text databases, such as product catalogs, phone books, and organization listings. The records are separated by blank lines. Since it doesn't impose any formatting restrictions to the records in such databases, its search output appearance can be customized to fit a board range of diverse requirements. For instance, you can embed links to graphics, audio files, or other multimedia objects in the text database, so the search results can be multimedia in nature! Extract! is intended for light duty search over moderately sized text databases.

The Swish site-wide search engine has the ability to search through a large set of files at high speed. It may not have all the bells and whistles of more sophisicated search engines, but the latter group pales when comparing search speeds! SWISH is an index search engine, which means it creates a compact and easy to access index of all important key words in a set of files first, and issues queries against the index file, rather than the original files for much faster search responses. SWISH displays as a list the URLs of files which contains keywords that you are interested in. Its search is always case insensitive, a factor that contributes to the compactness of its indices.

The Discover site-wide index search engine has the ability to search through a large set of files very quickly, and supports some very convenient and handy options such as approximate matching (e.g. finding misspelled words), and Boolean queries. An index search engine creates a compact and easy to access index of all important key words in a set of files first, and issues queries against the index file, rather than the original files for much faster search responses.

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