dtSearch gives Bike-alog(R) searching that's clear as a bike bell

Bike-alog(R) serves 2,000 bike stores by supplying a complete list of 100,000 items in the industry. The list includes popular bikes and bike supplies, as well as hard-to-find exotic parts and accessories, plus the latest in bike fashion and apparels. For each item, Bike-alog provides complete data on sales sources and wholesale pricing.

Recently, Bike-alog started supplying this information on CD. The problem that Bike-alog faced was providing superior data access, beyond mere access to lists of categories. So, for example, instead of entering bike bells and coming up with every type of bell in the industry, the customer could enter a particular brand name of bike bell and instantly find that. Or the customer could go straight to all the listings on cleats without worrying whether cleats would fall under the category of shoes or pedals. Or the customer could enter a part number for a known item and immediately compare supplier prices.

For this type of data access, Bike-alog needed full text searching. In this regard, Bike-alog found that the dtSearch Text Retrieval Engine had a number of advantages. Most important of these advantages was speed. "dtSearch is astoundingly fast", said Jeff Palley, President of Bike-alog. In addition, the dtSearch Text Retrieval Engine had a wide variety of search options that were essential for ease-of-use by Bike-alog's customers. For example, with stemming, a customer could enter wheel and also find wheels and wheeled. With synonym searching, a customer could enter apparel and also find clothes.

The dtSearch Text Retrieval Engine also provided for complete customization of Bike-alog's user interface for searching, allowing Bike-alog complete control over look and feel. Finally, the dtSearch Text Retrieval Engine was very easy to incorporate using Visual Basic. "We're a small shop", explained Mr. Palley. "We all ride our bikes to work. And we don't have a lot of programming manpower".

"By going with dtSearch, our members are getting an enormously valuable benefit that there is no way that they could've otherwise gotten for anywhere near its price", said Mr. Palley, "I can give dtSearch the highest recommendation".