Search Components Online

Python PDF Text Tools

We've recently discovered PDFMiner, a PDF parser and analyzer tool written entirely in Python. Actually, PDFMiner is a suite of tools including a parser,  a text renderer, and tools for extracting text. Yusuke Shinyama, who is at NYU, has brought together a number of capabilities in the form of two Python programs: pdf2txt and dumppdf. PDFMiner also supports multi-byte languages with an additional map file. The progams let you find the precise locaiton of test within a PDF, which is a major advantage over many other PDF tools you'll find.

PDFMiner even has a cool PDF to HTML conversion demo page to see what kinds of things you can do with PDFMiner, although some of the PDFs we tried did not display with true fidelity. Nonetheless, the tools provide insight into the kinds of things you may be able to do with PDF files in your custom pipeline stage, in the OPpenPipelin, or just for poking around.

The Subversion repository is maintained at Google's code.google.com, and you can download the PDFMiner source from www.unixuser.com.

Joomla CMS meets free IBM/Yahoo Search Engine

The free IBM/Yahoo search engine has been popular since it shipped last year.  And of course the open source Joomla! CMS continues to go like gang busters.  But what if they every got together?  Dream no more!

The folks over at TnR have got you covered with a new connector.  From their site:

TnR Global Enterprise Search Component for Joomla driven by IBM Yahoo! OmniFind Edition is a standard Joomla component that can be installed into the Joomla open source content management system. The component (and a matching search module) provide the Joomla site with direct access to an OmniFind search system. The Joomla administrator can define the look of the search box and the search results using a standard Smarty template. The OmniFind enterprise search can be placed on any server the Joomla system can reach, allowing it to be behind a corporate firewall.

http://www.tnrsearch.com/index.php/Latest/Esearch-Joomla-Component.html

Raritan Federated Search Platform

Raritan Technologies offers a number of connectors to interface search with multiple existing search engines and give the user a combined results list.  They even support Z39.50.

Check them out:
http://www.raritantechnologies.com/downloads.shtml

NIE offers Prepackaged Search Engine Planning

When companies would like to upgrade or replace their search engine, who should they call?  It's very easy to predict what each vendor will advise.

New Idea Engineering gets around this by offering a 2 week vendor neutral engagement to analyze the existing systems and plan a roadmap forward, with both strategic and tactical suggestions.  Some training is also provided.  The project can be customized as needed.  Sort of like having search experts in a box.

http://www.ideaeng.com/sbp/

Free MySQL Table Optimizer from Erik Hallander

This guy's website is pretty interesting too.

http://www.erikhallander.com/blog/2008/free-stuff-automatic-mysql-table-optimizer.html

AxmXML A Fast XML Parser

From France comes a nice fast XML parser (website in English of course!)  This might be handy if you were writing an XML search application.

From their Website:

AsmXml is a very fast XML parser and decoder for x86 platforms. It achieves high speed by using the following features:
    * Written in pure assembler
    * Optimized memory access
    * Parsing and decoding at the same time
To give an idea of the relative speed of AsmXml, the fastest open source XML parsers process between 10 and 30 MBs of XML per seconds while AsmXml processes around 200 MBs per seconds (on an Athlon XP 1800+).

This library is also very small, it will increase the size of your application by only 16K.
This parser is intended for applications that need intensive processing of XML. This project will likely appeal you if XML parsing is a bottleneck in your data-flow. For instance, it is well suited for bulk loads into databases.

http://mkerbiquet.free.fr/asm-xml/

Format Factory: Multimedia File Converter

This program converts between various multimedia audio and video file formats.  This might be useful for search engines trying to do audio mining (speech to searchable text)

From their website:

FormatFactory is a multifunctional media converter.
Provides functions below:
All to MP4/3GP/MPG/AVI/WMV/FLV/SWF.
All to MP3//WMA/MMF/AMR/OGG/M4A/WAV.
All to JPG/BMP/PNG/TIF/ICO/....
Rip DVD to video file.
MP4 files support iPod/iPhone/PSP format.
Source files support RMVB.

FormatFactory's Feature:
1 support converting all popular video,audio,picture formats to others.
2 Repair damaged video and audio file.
3 Reducing Multimedia file size.
4 Support iphone,ipod multimedia file formats.
5 Picture converting supports Zoom,Rotate/Flip,tags.
6 DVD Ripper.

http://formatoz.com

db Software Laboratory's free Database Browser

This looks like a really nice tool for database administrators.

Although this download is free, their site has a lot of other cool stuff (not free) for ETL ("Extract, Transform, Load") and database conversion tools.

http://www.dbsoftlab.com/index.php/Freeware/Database-Browser.html

FAST WebParts for SharePoint: FAST/Microsoft Release Open Source SharePoint Components

Microsoft and Open Source, that's right!

As you may recall, Microsoft acquired FAST Search and Transfer and their flagship ESP product line.  Microsoft is working to enhance the packaging and integration in order to bring top notch search capabilities to their very popular SharePoint content management system.

We've included some info from their website below the fold.

http://www.codeplex.com/espwebparts

Vuzit Online Document Viewer

With this tool you can allow your website visitors to view binary files like MS Word and PDF on your site without them needing to download and launch a viewer.  This could be handy, for example, if your documentation is in PDF but people complain about needing to launch the Adobe viewer.

http://vuzit.com