I've been using the Zoom Search Engine for over a year, and I've been very happy with it. But today I realized I hadn't told many people about it, so I had to fix that.So what's the Zoom Search Engine? It's a beautiful piece of software written by WrenSoft, an Australian web software company. Here's what I think is amazing about it:

• It's inexpensive: the Standard edition is $49, and the Professional edition is $99. (I have the Pro edition.) There's also a free edition for smaller sites. A side-by-side comparison of the different editions is available on the WrenSoft website.


• It's small in size, but feature-packed. The executable is 1.65 MB. Bloatware this is NOT. It is small and it packs a powerful punch. If you don't believe me, install it, then run through the various options. There are a LOT of them!


• It does the job — no crashing, no malfunctions. In over a year of serious use, with it running daily to index a lot of files for most of that time, it didn't crash once. It just did its job.


• Tech support is great, and included in the price of the software. I needed to contact them twice to ask them about some advanced configs for the app, and they responded within 12 hours. What's more, they actually solved my problem. There were no excuses and no passing the buck.


• It's a scalable piece of software. Not only will it index small, simple sites, but its indexing engine can use ASP, PHP, JavaScript or CGI. The CGI engine can be used for enterprise sites - we're talking hundreds of thousands of pages here! Not only will it index sites hosted on web servers, but it will also let you put a search engine on a site that runs off a CD or DVD.


• It spiders and indexes most document file types with the aid of free plugins that work with the paid editions of the software. They've got plugins for Word, WordPerfect, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, Flash and FlashPaper, and Rich Text formats. Having used all of these plugins over the last year, I can tell you they work a treat. They certainly do the job, and there's no false advertising involved.


• It's a customizable and flexible piece of software. You possess the search index. You have access to the actual files used by the search engine, and you can tweak the engine and the index as you please. You can adjust everything. I can't think of any other solution on the market that will let you do that. When it comes to this, it beats Atom and Google and any other solution, hands-down. Google's search appliances are a black box. You can play with the options, but you don't have access to the search technology. You can't pop the hood and have a look at what makes their searches tick.

So how exactly have I been using the Zoom Search Engine? It's been powering the site searches on Exprimare and the Road Management Catalog, among a few others. While Exprimare is a fairly small site (it's my consulting/portfolio site), the Road Management Catalog is a big site in terms of the content, file types and number of pages. It belongs to the World Bank, and vendors of various road construction, measuring, and testing equipment have accounts where they submit company information and upload brochures in various file formats.