AppleSearch
| Developer(s) | Apple Computer |
|---|---|
| Stable release |
1.5.1 / 1994
|
| Operating system | Mac OS |
| Type | Search engine |
| License | Proprietary |
AppleSearch was a client/server search engine from Apple Computer, first released for the "classic" Mac OS in 1994.
AppleSearch was a client/server application, although the vast majority of the logic was located in the server. The server portion periodically crawled a set of administrator-configured locations on hard drives, CD-ROMs and the network using AppleShare, indexing the documents it found after converting them to plain text using the Claris XTND document conversion system. A later version of the server, 1.5, could also be pointed at selected WAIS servers, using their indexes directly in addition to local ones. The same server also acted as a WAIS server, respond to WAIS requests sent to it over the internet. The server also offered a set of AppleEvents for use from Mac programs.
The server's query parser incorporated a number of features to help improve the ease-of-use of the query language. For instance, AppleSearch did not require the user to type in Boolean operators like AND or OR in their searches. While this is true for most search engines today, at the time this was a fairly uncommon feature. AppleSearch also supported stemming, which "expanded" search terms into similar words. Using stemming, a search on "pregnancy", for instance, would also find hits on "pregnant". Contractions, connecting words and punctuation were all handled as well.
Additionally, the search could be fed with the results of previous search in order to tune its results. For instance, if one searches on "turkey recipe", the first set of results might return a document on how to cook a turkey, but also one on middle-eastern cooking in Turkey. If the user then selected the document on cooking a turkey, they could then ask for more documents like that one. The engine would find key words in the document and use those as additional terms in the new search. This feature has since appeared in Google, under the Similar pages link.
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