Press Contact: Steven Isakson
Phone: (773) 252-5237
Fax: (815) 444-0301
E-Mail: steve@maxum.com
---Maxum Development adds PDF, Customizability to Phantom Web Crawler---
Crystal Lake, IL, July 20, 1999 -- Maxum Development Corporation, a
leading developer of tools for Macintosh and Windows Internet
servers, announced today that it would ship version 2.2 of Phantom,
its Web crawler and site search engine. The new version adds
significant new features, driving it into a new class of solution.
Avi Rappoport, industry Analyst at SearchTools.com, says that Phantom
2.2 has "An excellent browser interface, providing power and
flexibility in a very usable format, accessible to both webmasters
and programmers. It allows designers to control the look and feel of
their search interface, making it easy to set up completely different
designs for different areas or sites. Phantom is a strong contender
in the midrange market (500 - 5000 page sites) and as a small portal
search engine."
The most significant addition in Phantom 2.2 is support for indexing
text of Adobe Portable Document Format (Acrobat) documents. Text in
PDF documents will be transparently indexed just like text or HTML
pages are indexed in the previous version. This new feature makes it
possible to use Phantom as a standalone, cross-platform tool for full
text search and retrieval of PDF documents.
Current users of Phantom will be delighted with the enhanced
customizability added in the new version. Administrators have always
been able to customize Phantom's search and results pages. Now,
search, results and other templates can be separately customized for
each logical index hosted by a Phantom server. The
In addition to big new features, Phantom 2.2 has a number of smaller
enhancements. These include selectable folder depth when crawling,
support for indexing and searching on extended or arbitrary META
tags, and more control over user-defined agents. The administration
interface has been improved so that common tasks require accessing
fewer pages. Phantom's indexing speed is also increased in version
2.2, producing a 50% to 200% performance improvement when indexing a
large number of documents in a single run.
About Phantom
Phantom is a site search tool for Internet and intranet Web servers.
It supports indexing both local content and remote content using its
robot Web crawler. A single double-clickable application and a
straightforward Web administration make Phantom the "easiest way to
add search to your site". Easy to use does not mean Phantom is
stripped-down. It also supports high-end features like multiple
logical indexes, effective relevance ranking, and capacity for
thousands of indexed documents.
Phantom is priced at $395 and is available for Mac OS and Windows NT.
Phantom 2.2 is a free upgrade for users who purchased Phantom within
the past year, or users with older licenses can upgrade for $139.
Orders can be placed on-line at Maxum's Web site at
http://www.maxum.com/, by mail or fax, or by phone at (800) 813-3410.
Users can download a demonstration version of Phantom 2.2 from
Maxum's Web site. The downloadable demo package includes a
fully-functional, time-limited version of Phantom and complete
electronic documentation.
About Maxum
Founded in 1991, 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 Web servers and have since become industry
mainstays. All Maxum products are designed to enhance the function
and performance of Web sites by making them dynamic, interactive,
reliable and accessible.
