Terrier, a new cutting-edge software for the rapid development of web, intranet and desktop search engines, has all the prerequisites to become the European answer to Google.

This groundbreaking system from DCS utilises state-of-the-art web search technology. It offers a modular platform for the rapid development of large-scale Information Retrieval applications. Providing indexing and retrieval functionalities, Terrier comes with a powerful proof-of-concept desktop search application.

Terrier has an outstanding performance with respect to other current public technologies that aim to provide similar retrieval facilities.

Terrier has been successfully used in internationally-acclaimed forums and several public organisations in the Netherlands, in Italy and in the USA have expressed interest in using Terrier for their intranet search facilty. The British Computing Society and the Italian Ministry of Communications are currently using Terrier for their in-house intranet searches.

A version of Terrier is now available as open source software, to allow experimentation and research in Information Retrieval.

Since its recent release, over 60 well-established and industrial institutions have shown interest in using Terrier.

Terrier is the product of a three-year long EPSRC funded research project within the Information Retrieval research group of the Department of Computing Science.

Media Relations Office (media@gla.ac.uk)

For further information see: http://ir.dcs.gla.ac.uk/terrier/ Or contact: Iadh Ounis, Department of Computing Science University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8R tel: +44 0141 330 5652 email: ounis@dcs.gla.ac.uk

First published: 10 March 2005