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.

All latest news from the category: Information Technology

Here you can find a summary of innovations in the fields of information and data processing and up-to-date developments on IT equipment and hardware.

This area covers topics such as IT services, IT architectures, IT management and telecommunications.

Back to home

Comments (0)

Write a comment

Newest articles

Cichlids practicing brood care in 3D-printed snail shells

Time to Leave Home? Revealed Insights into Brood Care of Cichlids

Shell-dwelling cichlids take intense care of their offspring, which they raise in abandoned snail shells. A team at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence used 3D-printed snail shells to…

Amphiphile-enhanced wearable fabric generating electricity from movement

Smart Fabrics: Innovative Comfortable Wearable Tech

Researchers have demonstrated new wearable technologies that both generate electricity from human movement and improve the comfort of the technology for the people wearing them. The work stems from an…

Visualization of Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) stability over 60 years

Going Steady—Study Reveals North Atlantic’s Gulf Stream Remains Robust

A study by the University of Bern and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the USA concludes that the ocean circulation in the North Atlantic, which includes the Gulf Stream,…