SEFT: A Search Engine for Text


Owen de Kretser
Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, The University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia.

Alistair Moffat
Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, The University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia.


Status

Software Practice and Experience, 34(10):1011-1023, August 2004. Preliminary version published in Proc. 23nd Australasian Computer Science Conference, Canberra, Australia, February 2000, 58-65.

Abstract

We present a software tool called seft which balances the convenience of search tools such as grep with the functionality of full-text index-based information retrieval. Based on a novel retrieval heuristic which uses term locality as a guide to relevance, seft combines the freedom of natural language queries with the benefits of a ranked answer list and easy inspection of retrieval results. While not as fast as grep-style tools, seft provides a valuable facility for impromptu personal information retrieval tasks.

Software

The seft software is available here.

Full text

http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/spe.601.