You can use IndexDen to create a finely-tuned search function for your web site or application. If you have content you want your users to find, but you don't want to deal with complicated coding and system administration tasks, IndexDen is for you.
IndexDen is a service intended to be used mainly by developers or system administrators. It's not a standalone web search engine, and we don't currently have a way for you to set it up directly through the Web. It requires downloading software such as a Wordpress plug-in (if you wanted to add better search to your blog, for example) or writing a program to interact with our servers.
Please let us know what you would like to do with IndexDen, and we'll do our best to help you. Thanks for your interest!
IndexDen is a hosted service, which means that it runs on our servers over your Internet connection, what we like to call "in the cloud". Using IndexDen saves you from having to do any system administrations tasks or pay for hardware.
Very little. You can be up and running in minutes, and we take care of all the maintenance.
We provide clients for Python, Ruby, PHP and Java. Our API spec is public and consists of REST calls that can be made through HTTP, so if you don't use one of our client libraries, it’s easy to implement your own client or even use the API from the command line with tools like Curl. You can find open source clients in Clojure, Perl, C#, and more here.
We provide support via email at indexden@indexden.com and via chat through the pop-up window in the lower right corner of our site.
To index your existing data for the first time, you need to iterate through your document database and send each document to the index via the "add_document" function.
To keep your index up-to-date with the latest additions and changes on your site, you need to call the "add_document" function for new or changed documents, and the "delete_document" function for deleted documents.
IndexDen resolves most queries in well under the 30ms mark. For very large data sets and complex queries, times can go up to 100ms.
Absolutely. Basic accounts support 20-30 queries per second out of the box. If that's not sufficient for your needs, we can set up custom accounts that can easily handle several hundred queries per second.
Absolutely! For information about a custom plan tailored to your needs, please contact us.
Go to our IndexDen plans and select a plan. For trial plans, we only need your email address and a password. For plans that require payment, we also need your billing information.
Yes. You can cancel your account at any time without any prior notification.
Send us an email telling us you want to cancel, and we'll take care of it.
We charge for the paid plans every month in advance, and we provide the first month free of charge. This means that if you sign up, for example, on January 15th, you will not be charged until February 15th, and that will pay for the period from February 15th until March 14th.
Sure. We're working on automating this process, but in the meantime, contact us and we'll do it for you.
Contact us via email.
An index is a structure designed for quick and efficient keyword searches. Think of the index at the back of a book, and how you can find a page containing a particular word without having to scan every single page. When you create a new index in IndexDen and start adding entries to it, it is as if you are starting with an empty book and updating the index every time you add a section.
For example, let's say you have a blog and you want to index it so your users can search through it. You index the first post (post #1) which contains the word "apple". The index will contain an entry for "apple" pointing to the post #1. When a user searches for "apple" the index shows that "apple" is mentioned in post #1.
You can also split your document into several fields and index them as separate entities. For example, your blog post might be composed of a "title" field, an "author" field and a "content" field, etc. When you index the document, you provide its unique identifier (the document ID, or docid for short) and the contents of each field. You can later restrict your search to a specific field by using the field name in the query, for example "title:apple".
Yes. IndexDen gives you the ability to fine-tune your search results based on your specific needs. You can define your own scoring functions and document variables to influence the search results.
IndexDen uses scoring functions to customize the order of search results. Scoring functions are mathematical formulas that we apply to every document on search time to calculate a value (score) for it. We then use this value to sort the results.
The scoring functions can refer to the document's age, its relevance to the query and special variables that you can supply for a document, such as number of votes, or any numeric value that you can associate with your document and that somehow describes the importance of that document.
IndexDen is optimized to allow very frequent updates to document variables without slowing down the index.
You can define several scoring functions and choose which one to use for each query. When you change a scoring function, the new version immediately takes effect.
Scoring functions are different from typical database sort clauses in that they allow much greater flexibility.
See our Scoring Functions documentation page for more information.
As often as you wish. IndexDen doesn't actively fetch data from you as a web crawler would do. Instead, your application sends IndexDen the data as soon as it is created or updated.
There are many functional differences. For example, documents added to an IndexDen index are immediately searchable; document variables can be updated without having to re-index the whole document and they can be updated very quickly and at a very rapid pace without affecting the index performance; results can be sorted by arbitrary functions that include geolocation support.
But more importantly, IndexDen is a cloud-based, robust and scalable service, so you don't have to worry about managing servers, configuring the software and scalabilty.
Yes. IndexDen provides more complete, relevant, and timely search results, because we give you the ability to control what gets indexed, when it gets indexed, and how the results are sorted. Google Custom Search results are often stale or incomplete in comparison. Further, Google Custom Search requires you to show ads, which Google chooses in order to increase its own advertising revenue, so you may end up serving sponsored links for your competitors. IndexDen does not require ads.
Yes. From a security standpoint, we use security best practices, and our servers are not accessible in any way except to provide the search service. Since each customer has a unique key to access their own index, no unauthorized access is possible. Your data is as private as you choose to make it.
In terms of integrity, storing your data in the cloud can be more secure than storing it on-site, because cloud data is typically replicated in several locations and supported by a lot more hardware than most companies want to own and maintain.
IndexDen, like other full-text search alternatives, indexes only text. However, for common formats like PDF or Word, it is very easy to parse them to obtain the readable text by using open source tools.
IndexDen implements Boolean operators (and, or, and not) and phrase queries.
Yes. IndexDen’s scoring functions have enormous flexibility and will help you build a scoring system that perfectly matches your data’s semantics. In some situations, however, you may prefer to have manual control of the top result. For this, IndexDen implements a "promote" API call that enables you to pin down a particular document as the top result for a given query. Take a look at the "Promoting results" section of our API spec for more information.
| Documentation | About us | Legal | Social |
|---|---|---|---|
| Client libraries | Email support | Privacy policy | |
| FAQ | Badges | Terms of Service |
