Unique Search and Indexing Engine

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Search Engine technical Details


The search and indexing system is the heart of any electronic archiving system. The indexing system determines WHAT is searchable, how FAST you can search, how SCALABLE the system is, and how much data you can PROCESS. Athena Archiver has dedicated years of research and development into building a search and index system which achieves the highest levels of performance, reliability, and accuracy without any compromises. By contrast, most indexing systems trade-off accuracy for speed, size for flexibility, or security for performance. Athena Archiver is the first indexing system of its kind which requires absolutely no compromises to achieve high performance and accuracy.


Most search engines are built for web search such as AltaVista, Yahoo, or Google. However, Athena Archiver has an indexing system which is built to solve the specific challenges of managing a continuously changing corporate archive. Many email archiving vendors choose web-oriented search engines to solve email archiving needs. There are completely different challenges when faced with indexing the web versus indexing a petabyte sized corporate data store. Some of the biggest differences involve the intolerance for inaccurate results in a legal setting.

Unprecedented Performance

Performance

The Athena Archiver indexing system can index 30 million emails a day on a standard $3000 Dell server. That means customers can buy less hardware to achieve the same throughput. Less hardware means less support staff. At the end of the day, that means more responsive, reliable systems at a fraction of the cost of our other systems.

100% Accuracy

While other search engines pick and choose what to index in order to save size, we index everything. That includes punctuation, special characters, and foreign symbols. We break data up into structured data so that you can refine your searches with incredible detail. We can index everything without a significant performance penalty because of our highly optimized data structures and innovative search code. In indexing terminology, stop words are common English words which are usually ignored in order to save index space. It is an example of the kind of frequent compromises that are made in many search engines to achieve higher performance at the cost of accuracy. Athena Archiver does not use "stop words" because we insist on 100% accuracy.

100% Security

All of our indexes and data are stored with 256 bit AES encryption. Keys are managed on a completely different server so that in the unlikely event of a full breach of our data center, the data is completely unintelligible and fully encrypted