Press Contact: Dean Dahlgren
Phone: (630) 830-1113
Fax: (630) 830-1262
E-Mail: dean@maxum.com
Maxum will be in the Apple Pavillion at Internet World.
Maxum Development Ships Phantom 2.0 for the Macintosh, the Next Generation
of Web Crawling
Maxum Announces Phantom 2.0 for Windows to Ship Early Second Quarter
Internet World, Los Angeles, CA, March 12, 1997 — Maxum Development
Corporation today announced the shipment of Phantom-tm 2.0, a major upgrade
to their market leading Web crawler for Macintosh. Phantom 2.0 brings
second generation Web crawling to Macintosh Webmasters and is still the
only commercially available crawler/search engine for the Mac OS.
In addition, Maxum announced they will be shipping a Windows version of
Phantom in early second quarter. Phantom for Windows will provide users
the same features as the Macintosh version. A beta of the Windows version
is available today on Maxum’s Web site at: http://www.maxum.com/Phantom/
Phantom enables Webmasters to build targeted search and retrieval
capabilities into their Web sites. It is perfect for organizations with
multiple (even hundreds) of Web servers, allowing the Webmaster to make the
entire site searchable from a single entry point. Phantom is also ideal
for content specific search engines, where a Webmaster may want to make the
content on his own site more accessible, as well as the information on
related servers.
“Phantom’s ability to index remote sites gives us a competitive edge in the
trade right now,” says Marc Smith, co-founder of 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 can crawl Web sites running on any platform, including Macintosh,
UNIX or Windows. Phantom also archives and mirrors complete Web sites and
performs automatic updating while providing a host of reporting and site
management capabilities. Phantom has search logs that allow Webmasters to
see what users are requesting and gauge what kinds of information they
ought to be providing.
Phantom can now be administered via a Web browser, either on the same
machine or remotely from anywhere on the Internet. Webmasters can
completely customize the search request pages, search results and proactive
agents. Other new options include the ability to control every detail of
the crawler, the indexer, the Web server and the remote administration
process. Also new is the ability to filter pages from the index and the
ability to index pages directly on the Phantom server’s file system.
Phantom 2.0 allows Webmasters and users to set up customized “Agents”.
Phantom Agents will automatically search those areas of the Web specified
by the user and notify the user when pages in a query result are changed,
updated or new pages become available. This key feature provides users
with an information service, instead of just search results.
Phantom has integrated scheduling of index updates and agents, and the
ability to frame concept searches, also called Query by Example (QBE).
Unlike many search engines on other platforms, Phantom will allow both
exclusions and inclusions by either file type or path.
Current users of Phantom will see significant improvement in the
performance of crawling, indexing and searching. Also, Phantom’s data file
size has been reduced by as much as 75%. Phantom 2.0 also offers
dramatically improved MIME type and ISO-8859 (international character)
support.
Additional improvements in Phantom 2.0:
– Automated advertising banners
– Site index maps
– Automatic scheduling for backups
– Export/import of preferences and session information
– Alias support
– Improved searching interface
– Relevancy ranking of search results
Phantom 2.0 demos are available for downloading at
“http://www.maxum.com/Phantom/”. The version 2.0 upgrade will be free to
all current registered users. Phantom retails for $395.00 and new
customers can order by either visiting “http://www.maxum.com/” or by
calling Maxum Development at (630) 830-1113.
Maxum Development is a leading developer of commercial World Wide Web
server tools for Macintosh. Maxum’s Eddy award winning NetCloak was the
first commercial tool for Macintosh based WWW servers, and Maxum has
continued to innovate with the addition of Net Forms, PageSentry, Phantom,
WebLock, RushHour and the Personal Web server to be integrated in the Mac
OS. All Maxum products are designed to enhance the function and
performance of Web sites by making them dynamic, interactive, reliable,
secure, fast and accessible.
Maxum, the Maxum logo, NetCloak, NetForms, PageSentry, WebLock, Phantom,
RushHour and the MaxumPack 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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