For Immediate Release
Maxum Development Announces Phantom 2.0,
the Next Generation of Web Crawling for Macintosh
Macworld, San Francisco, CA, January 7, 1997 -- Maxum Development Corp.
today announced Phantom 2.0, a major upgrade to the currently released
version, Phantom 1.1. 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.
As the Internet continues to expand, Web search and retrieval tools are
becoming essential in making information not only available but accessible.
Monolithic search engines such as Yahoo offer important services, but in
many cases only add to the information overload.
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, cofounder 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 servers running any HTTP server software on any platform,
including Macintosh, UNIX, or Windows NT. Phantom also archives and mirrors
complete Web sites and performs automatic updating while providing a host
of reporting and site management capabilities.
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, search results and reporter pages, as well
as automatically add advertising-style banners. Other new options
available 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.
Current users of Phantom will see significant improvement in the
performance of crawling, indexing and searching, and 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:
*Email notification of changed pages
*Automatic advertising module
*Site index maps
*Automatic periodic backups
*Export/import of preferences and session information
*Alias support
*Improved searching interface
*Relevancy ranking of search results
Phantom 2.0 is expected to ship in February 1997. A beta version is
currently available for download 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 Development was the first to ship
commercial tools for Macintosh-based WWW servers. 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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