Zoom Enterprise Vs. Solr on .NET

[keyman]

I am IT support for an organization working with a contracting company that we hired to build a Faceted search engine for
several high-use websites. We have reached the point of creating a short-list of products for the job.
I am a hardcore user of Zoom(Enterprise) and the contractor has Solr on .NET as their main choice. The
contracting company stated that they looked at the free downloaded version of Zoom and had two issues.

1. The inability to update the index without spidering. They said that Solr allows instanteous addition
of new entries without the need to rerun a spider.

2. The inability for the Zoom spider to handle custom metadata for binary files


Before I go to war and fight for Zoom, I want to be absolutely sure if there are any credible responses to these
two questions. Although I love Zoom, if Solr is the better product for this particular project, I don't
want my prejudice for Zoom to cloud my judgement.

Thanks

[David]

Zoom can do both,

There are command line (and GUI) options to add new pages to an existing index. See,
http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/support...mmandline.html
You pass in a list of new pages so no spidering is required.

You can find details about custom meta data here,
http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/support...ta_fields.html
For adding custom data to binary files, you can use .desc files.

[Ray]

To elaborate further, you can find more information on your first requirement under the "Incremental Indexing" section (chapter 2.10) in the Users Guide.

And specifying meta data for binary files is described under section 2.17.7 ("Using custom description (.desc) files"). There is also a feature to specify offline .desc files (so they don't need to be placed on the server), which is described under section 2.2.3 (Spider options).