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.