Competitive Summary
Speed
User Interface
Accuracy and Information Access
PC Overhead

Competitive Summary

= Best in class = Competitive = Trailing

	AltaVista Search Personal eXtension 97	Find Fast from Microsoft	TurboFind from Alpha Software	Search'97 Personal 1.1 by Verity
Speed
User Interface
Accuracy and Information Access
PC Overhead
Price	$29.95	Free with Windows 95	$39.95	$50.0
THE BOTTOM LINE	11/12	6/12	7/12	7/12

The biggest thing you should get out of this report is that the "paid for" products do provide users with tangible value.
TurboFind and Search'97 have their roots in traditional search and retrieval technologies. AltaVista Search Personal eXtension 97 has its roots in the technology that made the most popular and fastest World Wide Web search engine: http://www.altavista.digital.com.

Speed

All of these products create an index of the words and numbers found within the documents on your PC. When you do a query, these products look up the answer in their index and then show you a pointer to the file(s) on their results display.

As you can see from this table, indexing speed varies greatly between the products. AltaVista Search Personal eXtension 97 is almost 4 time faster than its nearest competitor. The other three products have slower initial indexing speeds but make up for some of this by doing incremental updates as you create new information on your PC.

Actual search and retrieval times are very good on the three "paid for" products. Most users are not going to see a huge difference between 1 to 2 seconds and 4 to 5 seconds. However, few people are willing to wait a few minutes for an answer to their search and retrieval question.

	AltaVista Search Personal eXtension 97	Find Fast from Microsoft	TurboFind from Alpha Software	Search'97 Personal 1.1 from Verity
Building The First Index - (Over 1,700 documents with over 2.5 million words)	16 minutes to index both hard drives	4 hours 1 minute to index both hard drives (all files indexed and optimized for phrase searching)	1 hour 13 minutes to index both hard drives	57 minutes to index both hard drives.
Index Updating	All files are re-indexed, speed as before	Incremental (slow but this is a background task)	Incrementally indexes files as they are created	4 minutes four seconds for complete incremental update
Phrase Search	1 to 2 seconds	4 minutes 1 second	2 to 3 seconds	4 seconds
Single Word Search	1 to 2 seconds	3 minutes 42 seconds	2 to 3 seconds	5 seconds
File Name Search	1 to 2 seconds	13 seconds	2 to 3 seconds	4 seconds
Rating

User Interface

User interface issues are very subjective. All of these product are usable. We are judging them on the following points.

• Does the product force the user to learn a new user interface?
• How does the product take advantage of existing user skills?
• Does the product use a Web browser or a proprietary user interface?
• Is the user interface consistent from the PC to the WEB, from searching for email to files on a hard disk.
• How easy is it to change the indexing process's configuration? For example, adding new file types into the index. Or, adding / deleting an information repository.
• How easy is it to do a simple query? Do you need to read a manual?
• How easy is it to take advantage of advanced query features? How much time do you need to spend with the manual.

Accuracy and Information Access

All of the products had little trouble with our sample searches as long as the files we were looking for had been indexed. This table illustrates the issues that determine what gets indexed.

The new Microsoft office 97 file formats definitely provide differentiation between the "paid for" products. Only AltaVista Search Personal eXtension 97 and Microsoft Fast Find supports the new Microsoft Office 97 file formats.
In terms of file format support, more is definitely better if you work with other people who use a variety of applications. Or, if you must work with information created with mature applications.
Exchange Mail support is another good differentiation point. TurboFind does not support Microsoft Exchange. Verity does support Microsoft Exchange but not with this particular product.
Finally, we look at the different types of queries you can submit to each of the products. Case sensitivity is a good differentiation point if you need to look for words or letter and number combinations where capitalization is used in specific ways.

	AltaVista Search Personal eXtension 97	Find Fast from Microsoft	TurboFind from Alpha Software	Search'97 Personal 1.1 from Verity
Number of Supported File Formats	Indexes over 200 formats from many different vendors	Less than 60 Primarily Microsoft formats, industry standards like ASCII and format converters added from the Win 95 CD and Win Plus Pack	Indexes over 100 formats from many different vendors. Views over 200 different file formats.	Indexes over 140 formats from many different vendors
Supported Email	Eudora, Microsoft Exchange, Netscape Mail	Microsoft Exchange	Eudora, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape Mail	Eudora, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape Mail
Office 95	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Office 97	Yes (no ppt)	Yes	Not yet	Not yet
ZIPPED File Support	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
HTML	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
PDF	Yes	No	Yes according to the manual	Yes
Mail attachments	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
Phrase search	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Near search	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
Case sensitivity	Yes	Yes	No	No
Advance Query Capabilities	Boolean, special keywords / fields, user controlled relevance ranking, and others.	Limited	Boolean, special keywords / fields, user controlled relevance ranking, thesaurus, stemming aids, and others.	Boolean, special keywords / fields, user controlled relevance ranking, thesaurus, stemming aids, and others.
Rating

PC Overhead

This section examines how much the resource load is on the PC running the search and retrieval product. We did this by comparing Microsoft Word performance while the indexing process was running to performance when the indexing process was not running. It also looks at the minimum recommended PC configuration for each product.

AltaVista Search Personal eXtension 97 and Microsoft Find Fast got the top marks. TurboFind and Search'97 received lower marks because of their impact on other programs during active indexing.

None of the paid for products received the three star rating because all of them require large amounts of memory and disk resources to function effectively. Microsoft Find Fast uses less disk space and less RAM. However, keep in mind that it doesn't do as much as the "paid for" products.