What’s the European answer to Google – TERRIER, the search engine with added byte

Terrier, a new cutting-edge software for the rapid development of web, intranet and desktop search engines, developed by researchers at the University of Glasgow, has all the prerequisites to become the European answer to Google.

This groundbreaking system from DCS utilises state-of-the-art web search technology. It offers a modular platform for the rapid development of large-scale Information Retrieval applications. Providing indexing and retrieval functionalities, Terrier comes with a powerful proof-of-concept desktop search application.

Terrier outperformed all other participating industrial and academic technologies, particularly in web and terabyte-scale settings, in the annual 2004 International Text Retrieval Conference, held by the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the USA.

Terrier has been successfully used in internationally-acclaimed forums and several public organisations in the Netherlands, in Italy and in the USA have expressed interest in using Terrier for their intranet search facilty. The British Computing Society and the Italian Ministry of Communications are currently using Terrier for their in-house intranet searches.

A beta version of Terrier is now available as open source software, to allow experimentation and research in Information Retrieval.

Since its recent release, over 60 well-established and industrial institutions have adopted Terrier.

Terrier is the product of a three-year long EPSRC funded research project within the Information Retrieval research group of the Department of Computing Science.