In 1983, ZyLAB was the first company to introduce full-text search to the PC-platform. Since then, ZyLAB's software has been responsible for petabytes (1 petabyte = 1000 terabytes) of searchable information, billions of scanned and searchable paper-based documents, and millions of mailboxes.
New search engine
We started several years ago when we designed our new ZyLAB search engine which we codenamed TBIE (Tera Byte Search Engine). Our goals were ambitious: we aimed for unprecedented speed and scalability, and planned to go way beyond standard search technology, to implement the fastest search engine for fault tolerant retrieval in incomplete and erroneous data and to have the most powerful query language to deal with typical legal, regulatory and investigative queries. An additional, but no less ambitious, goal was to lay a very strong foundation to enable us to easily advance our ideas for computational linguistics, embedded text-mining, text classification and machine learning.
By working closely together with our most demanding clients worldwide, we were able to develop and test what we consider to be a major step forwards in this multi-year development process. We’ve added the ability to scale out and manage our search engine over large clusters of machines. Both indexing and searching can be distributed over as many machines as desired and indexes can be centralized or distributed for better performance or robustness needs.
Unlimited scalability
The scalability of our new search engine is almost unlimited: we can index multiple terabytes of data in a matter of just a few hours (depending on the hardware), whilst at the same time maintaining the ability to search faster than any other product for large queries containing positional operators, quorum search, wildcards & fuzzy matching (also at the beginning of words), and complex regular expressions.
We have also made the work of IT managers easier by adding new support functionalities such as index checksums (to allow index validation to safeguard against index corruption caused by hardware or incorrect manual changes), and monitoring tools showing index status, the status of the environment, currently running tasks, and much more. Users need less training because we have made it easier to write complex regular expressions, fuzzy queries and large embedded queries. We have added parsing and tokenization flexibility for special search tasks and for non-Roman languages.
Altogether we have worked for over one-and-half years on this new version and programed and tested more than 600 new features, improvements and outstanding issues.
Faster and more flexible
Users of both our Information Management Platform and our eDiscovery platform can benefit from all these improvements. We have made several changes in the ZyLAB Information Management interface making it possible to use all these new features; we have even made it possible to download searchable PDFs from our open XML-TIFF archives, making distribution of data to third parties much easier.
So, if you have to deal with many terabytes of data and if you wish to provide your users with the fastest and most flexible search, then you need to upgrade now! We will organize a special webinar for all our users and IT administrators shortly, in which we will explain the new functionalities of our TBIE search engine in detail. If you plan your upgrade now, you can benefit immediately by applying all of this new functionality in your organization.
