WASI is a sophisticated search engine. The purpose of a search engine in any indexing system is simple, to find every item that matches a query, no matter where it is located in the file system. The trick for the software designer is to create a search engine that carries out this job quickly and accurately while taking up a little disk space as possible. What users need, however, is a tool to help determine which data are really relevant.

Why? Because the problem with a large collection of document is that it is easy to find too many answers to any single query. Search engines are now being designed to go beyond simple, broadband searches for which WASI is so popular. One of the more popular approaches is used by topic, search engine used in lotus notes, Adobe. Acrobat, and a variety of other products.

It uses both keywords and information searching to rank the relevance of each document. Topic might return a list of hundred documents that match the users criteria but they would be listed in order of the relevance that topic assigns. A different approach is offered by context based searching. As exemplified by architect, these tools let the user enter a query and then come up with the relevant data based on the context of the documents based on the context of the words, not the words per se.

The result is that the system might find stories than don’t have any of the words in your search but that does have the same general meaning. For instance, you might look for ‘electronic commerce” and find an article that references “digital money”. In theory, the system finds documents with the right meaning.

This engine is probably not for everyone, but its approach is certainly promising. Other approaches to data searching on the web or on other wide area networks are available. The most compelling is oracle’s context, which can go through a variety of documents and create its own summary, pulling about three key sentences from each documents that can be published on the web. Folio views lets users publish “info bases” on the Internet and search those documents with relevance based search tools. Both Folio and lotus are aimed at companies that want to publish corporate data for their own customers.