Beginning of January, we decided to try and contact them per phone. Unfortunately they don’t allow “normal” people or companies to speak directly with someone of their marketing department.  The only thing they told us we could do is to send a fax or an e-mail. So immediately after the phone call we sent a mail to the e-mail address which was given to us (ch_marketing@dell.com) with our letter attached as PDF. Again no answer from this e-mail address neither.

After waiting one week, we tried our very last option - send a fax. That’s what we did to the number they have given us. Fax went through, but guess what ? No answer neither…

We don’t really understand the total lack of transparency or communication on the side of DELL and why can’t they just write a small mail to at least say sorry we are not interested. In my opinion, an answer even if negative is the minimum what can be done and should be done. It is also curious that one can’t even speak with their marketing department directly per phone. We can’t believe that DELL has lost our letter or so because they received it three times via three different communication media. If there would be another media we would also go for it… Maybe a telegram would work ?

Analyzing our web logs and statistics also revealed no trace of any kind of domain name belonging to DELL. This would mean that they didn’t even take 2 minutes to have a quick look at our project and test it. But this is just a supposition as it could be that their IP address range hasn’t any domain name associated to it. Well it wouldn’t surprise me anyway if they never tested our search engine.

Finally from all this we can simply deduct that DELL doesn’t care about interesting projects and isn’t even bothered to reply polite letters, faxes or even mails. One would say to us, what did you expect from such a big company ?

On the other side, during this Christmas we received some alternative propositions from private persons and companies. This makes us quite enthusiastic and we are pretty sure we will find another solution without DELL. Still we would appreciate DELL answering us…

The server itself only does the crawling whereas the data crawled by that same server gets stored on a network file server. This is actually already one bottleneck for a search engine as the data should be stored on the same crawling server or cluster of servers to avoid losing performance due to the data continuously being read and written through the network to the file server. Second bottleneck is the memory of the server, which is currently limited to 1 GB. Nowadays 1 GB is really nothing, but the server being already a few years old won’t fit any extra memory. And last but not least bottleneck: the CPU which is always working at full power during the crawling and indexing.

It is not really a big problem to continue running like that but it simply takes longer than we would like it to. Therefore and to speed things up we are looking for a hardware sponsor which could sponsor us a server with the minimum following requirements:

• two Intel Quad Core 2.6 GHz processors
• 8 GB of memory
• two disks of 1 TB in a hardware RAID 1 configuration
• two redundant power supplies

Thinking “Swiss”, as our search engine does, we have inquired last week a Swiss based hardware company called Transtec but unfortunately they already used their whole yearly sponsoring budget. I am guessing that this is due to the CERN with their Large Hadron Collider as Transtec is listed as an official sponsor for this massive project. After reflection, this made me think that the end of a year is not such a prosper time to look for a sponsor. On the other side we are soon in 2009, so let’s think positive. In this enthusiastic state of mind we have reiterated our sponsor query asking this time the computer company DELL and have sent our sponsor inquiry letter this Tuesday. Let’s hope this will work as their PowerEdge servers are really nice.

Just to mention that in counterpart we will offer a prominent place to the hardware sponsor on our future and planned sponsor page. Right now we already have one sponsor for the hosting of our server but I will speak about this sponsor in another separate post.

I will of course let you know as soon as we get an answer on the outcome of our sponsoring inquiry with DELL. Until then our current server will do his best and will be working really hard…

Luckily an old friend of mine called Daniel, a native Italian speaker, was so kind to do the translations for TooT this week and we just included them into TooT a few hours ago. As of today we are quite content to be able to provide TooT in four languages, treating each Swiss language used here equally as a result. This goes towards two of our important goals for TooT which are accessibility and conveniency.

I would like to simply end this post with a huge cheer to Daniel for his work!

Back to TooT now, we were quite active last week and managed to get the core features of TooT up and running correctly including a very first version of the TooT front-end with its respective design. The crawler has also been further optimized and the URL fetching process is now much faster. There is still one step of crawling which isn’t as fast as we would like it to be. This step the so called generate step which includes the generation of a new fresh segment for the crawling so we are still working on it. As I am writing this article, there are 279′399 pages indexed in our test database.

In addition, the language issue with the special characters used in French and German have been solved and they can now be used correctly in any kind of search queries. In my last post I forgot to mention that actually one part of Switzerland speaks Italian. Although it is a very small part of Switzerland situated in the South at the border with Italy which uses this language, we ought to support Italian. We want everybody in Switzerland being able to use our search engine without discrimination of any kind. In order to achieve this we will try to find someone as soon as possible who can translate the main functionality of TooT in that charming language.

Let’s hope this week will be as productive as last week in order to bring you again some good news about our progress…

One of these issues is the handling of special characters such as the so called german « Umlauts », which is very important for the search engine because most of the websites in Switzerland are in German as this is Switzerland’s major language. So we must make sure words indexed with these special characters are indexed properly and can be searched for. The same applies to the french language and it’s « accents ».

Terminal screenshot of the TooT crawler live fetching and indexing various pages of swiss websites.

If you have already been TooTed, so to say crawled by us :-), you should see the following browser entry in your web access log files:

Toot/Nutch-0.9 (Toot crawler; http://www.toot.ch/; crawler(at)toot(dot)ch)

You will see the same in your web statistics software. So don’t be frightened, TooT doesn’t hurt, it just indexes your pages in our database and won’t do anything else. Of course, if you see some kind of strange behavior from our crawler don’t hesitate to contact us, but this shouldn’t be the case. 

The next test crawls have been programmed to automatically run in the night, starting at midnight Central European Time. This is to populate our test index with more and more content for better testing.

We will now be working on the front end as well as doing some crawling optimization at the same time and will keep you posted here on this blog about the progress of TooT. So stay tuned…