TR-WWW

• Version: 1.3
• Author: Adrian Vanzyl
• Requirements: none
• Cost: $50-$3000 (shareware)
• Pros: No indexing required, supports relevance ranking as well as context searching
• Cons: Not zippy, does not fully support Boolean logic
• Remote location: <URL:http://www.monash.edu.au/informatics/tr-www.html>
• Tricks location: <URL:http://152.1.24.177/teaching/archives/tr-www.sit.hqx>

TR-WWW is a shareware search engine from Monash University Medical Informatics in Australia. It is based on "Total Research, the complete research system for dealing with unstructured textual information, searching it, extracting information, generating reports and integrating this with a database." As the home page of TR-WWW states, "TR-WWW is a modified version of TR designed to work with MacHTTP. It has all the search strengths of the normal version of TR [Total Research], but requires a web client to access its functionality and to act as its user interface."

In short, TR-WWW is searches and retrieves documents from an unstructured collection of information (read text files) based on end-user input.

With a bit of tweaking, TR-WWW can provide simple or more robust interfaces to collections of data. In its simplest form, an interface can be presented only providing an input field and a submit button. The other extreme is to give the reader a choice context versus relevance ranking of hits, Boolean operations, or even the document set to be searched.

The real strength of TR-WWW is that it requires no indexing. Consequently, you can set up a mechanism for saving files in a directory and whenever requests are made to search the contents of that directory your data will be ready. Thus, TR-WWW is a good choice for dynamic data.

On the down side, TR-WWW does not seem to work well with "large" files (over 32K) nor with too many files in one directory (about 100). If the number of files is too great or the size of the files is too large, then TR-WWW times out or lacks the RAM for successful processing.

Eric last edited this page on September 26, 1995. Please feel free to send comments.