Press Contact: Dean Dahlgren
Phone: (708) 830-1113
Fax: (708) 830-1262
dean@maxum.com
Mactivity Booth # 319
For Immediate Release
Maxum Development Ships Phantom, the First Commercial
Web Crawler for the Macintosh
Mactivity, San Jose, CA., July 14, 1996 — Maxum Development Corp. today
announced it is shipping Phantom 1.1, an upgraded version of AKTIV
Software’s Macintosh-based Web crawler (formerly called Duppies).
Phantom will scan any number of Web sites and build a complete, searchable
index of their HTML pages. Once a site has been scanned, Phantom allows
Web visitors to perform searches using simple queries. Phantom also
archives and mirrors complete Web sites and performs automatic updating
while providing a host of reporting and site management capabilities.
Phantom follows all established rules for Web Robots, including the robot
exclusion standard, and won’t overload servers with simultaneous requests.
Some of Phantom’s additional features include:
* Independent server or CGI execution
* Fully customizable HTML end-user interface
* Multi-page query responses
* Meta keyword supports
* Username and passwords for protected sites
* Automatic updating of search indexes
* “Noise word” filtering
* Full activity logging
By scanning servers using the Web, as opposed to traditional search methods
based on the Mac OS file system, Phantom allows seamless searches of
multiple servers. The Web site being scanned can be running any HTTP
server software and be based on any platform, including Macintosh, UNIX, or
Windows NT. Any number of Web sites can be indexed and searched by a
single Phantom server, allowing Webmasters to give their users an easy way
to search not only their sites but related sites as well.
“Phantom is the first and only search engine for the Macintosh that gives
fast professional results like Lycos or Infoseek,” says Jason Vance,
Webmaster, Strata Inc. “We have tried a number of search programs for our
WWW services, and Phantom was the best by far for the Macintosh platform.”
The Phantom search engine provides keyword searching, Boolean operators and
phonetic searching as well as the ability to provide custom HTML headers
and footers to totally integrate the search engine into a Web site. It
will also automatically update its indexes at predefined times and flag any
pages that have been updated.
“Phantom’s ability to index remote sites gives us a competitive edge in the
trade right now,” says Marc Smith, Co-Founder, The Antiquarian Book
Network. “It gives us the power to incorporate the entire on-line book
trade within our search engine, making us one of the highest profile book
sites on the Internet.”
Phantom 1.1 is an upgrade to AKTIV Software’s “Duppies 1.0” and will be
free to all registered users of Duppies. The new version includes:
* Substantially improved performance
* Multi-page query responses
* Meta keyword support
* Username and password support
“Phantom represents a tremendous opportunity for Webmasters to improve
service to their users, with the ease-of-use they expect from Mac Web
tools”, says John O’Fallon, President of Maxum Development. “Web crawlers
and high-performance searching is no longer just for high-end UNIX
workstations.”
Maxum Development is a leading developer of commercial World Wide Web
server tools for business and education. Maxum products, NetCloak and
NetForms, were the first commercial tools for Macintosh-based WWW servers
and are now industry standards. All Maxum products are designed to enhance
the function and performance of Web sites by making them dynamic,
interactive, reliable, secure, fast, and now with Phantom, accessible.
Maxum, the Maxum logo, NetCloak, NetForms, PageSentry, WebLock, Phantom and
RushHour are trademarks of Maxum Development Corp. Other product and
corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of other
companies, and are used only for explanation and to the owners’ benefit,
without intent to infringe.
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