Maxum Development Corp. announced it is shipping Phantom 1.1, an upgraded version of AKTIV Software's Apple Macintosh-based Web crawler (formerly called Duppies).

Phantom will scan any number of Web sites and build a complete, searchable index of their HTML pages. Once a site has been scanned, Phantom allows Web visitors to perform searches using simple queries. Phantom also archives and mirrors complete Web sites and performs automatic updating while providing a host of reporting and site management capabilities. Phantom follows all established rules for Web Robots, including the robot exclusion standard, and won't overload servers with simultaneous requests.

Some of Phantom's additional features include:

* Independent server or CGI execution * Fully customizable HTML end-user interface * Multi-page query responses * Meta keyword supports * Username and passwords for protected sites * Automatic updating of search indexes * "Noise word" filtering * Full activity logging

By scanning servers using the Web, as opposed to traditional search methods based on the Mac OS™file system, Phantom allows seamless searches of multiple servers. The Web site being scanned can be running any HTTP server software and be based on any platform, including Macintosh, UNIX, or Windows NT. Any number of Web sites can be indexed and searched by a single Phantom server, allowing Webmasters to give their users an easy way to search not only their sites but related sites as well.

"Phantom is the first and only search engine for the Macintosh that gives fast professional results like Lycos or Infoseek," says Jason Vance, Webmaster, Strata Inc. "We have tried a number of search programs for our WWW services, and Phantom was the best by far for the Macintosh platform."

The Phantom search engine provides keyword searching, Boolean operators and phonetic searching as well as the ability to provide custom HTML headers and footers to totally integrate the search engine into a Web site. It will also automatically update its indexes at predefined times and flag any pages that have been updated.

"Phantom's ability to index remote sites gives us a competitive edge in the trade right now," says Marc Smith, Co-Founder, The Antiquarian Book Network. "It gives us the power to incorporate the entire on-line book trade within our search engine, making us one of the highest profile book sites on the Internet."

Phantom 1.1 is an upgrade to AKTIV Software's "Duppies 1.0" and will be free to all registered users of Duppies. The new version includes:

* Substantially improved performance * Multi-page query responses * Meta keyword support * Username and password support

"Phantom represents a tremendous opportunity for Webmasters to improve service to their users, with the ease-of-use they expect from Mac™Web tools", says John O'Fallon, President of Maxum Development. "Web crawlers and high-performance searching is no longer just for high-end UNIX workstations."

 

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