About

Methanol is a fully customizable web crawling system. It allows you to define your own rules as to what filetypes that should be included in during the search. When setting up your own system, you are able to define exactly how all found filetypes, such as HTML, CSS, image files, flash files, video files should be handled.

Methanol's advanced web crawler can be scripted using Javascript with E4X, and extract meta-data that is uploaded to the system. The system administrator may set up any kind of rules to extract data, which in turn will be accessible to users through a simple search engine.

Why Methanol?

• You or your company might want to keep track of external data that constantly changes.
• Large search engines like Google are restricted to text content or images only. By running your own, specialized search engine that fit your needs, you can more easily find the data you are looking for.
• Methanol is distributed, you can split up different parts of the system on different servers.
• Due to the extensibility of the system, you can index files such as audio, video, XML or documents by extracting meta data.
• Integrate the search engine with your own website easily. PHP5 class available, but any server-side language can easily connect to the Methanol master server and query it using a simple protocol.